Ok, so, since I'm apparently in the mood to poke at dangerous things, let's have a discussion about names, and pseudonyms, and when it is and isn't okay to connect them.

I've been wanting to talk about this for..a while. Because slash fandom (and several online communities it's adjacent to) have very strict ethical norms about connecting the name a person uses with other names they may have used in other times or contexts, best summarized as: don't.

There are of course exceptions: when the person themself is completely open about connecting the names, it seems to be considered generally okay to make the connection yourself, but to still call them by the name they prefer.

And then there are the cases when the person is changing names solely in order to engage in shenanigans: for example, I have rarely seen anyone object to the names being publicly connected if someone is sockpuppeting to evade a ban.

But then we get into trickier situations, where a person has perpetrated fell deeds under multiple names, but also had actual probably-valid reasons for using multiple names, and that's when it starts to get really tricky, right? At what point does a community's need to know about a pattern of unacceptable behavior outweigh a person's right to (re)define their online identity?

( non-detailed discussions of the sort of situations you might expect under cut )