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I concur with Marcus on this. Speaking for myself, I take into account the person's name, country, any url to their site, when they created their account, and anything else I can gauge by what they write, including their language ability and level of Moodle experience. All these pieces of information can help me to better answer questions.

Doing online support to people from all over the world, many of whom speak English as a second language, have different versions of Moodle, different server setups, different levels of technical and pedagogical experience, and different communication abilities, is very, very difficult. And it is made more difficult without any helpful communication aids such as facial expression, tone of voice, clear explanations, knowledge of Moodle specific vocabulary, screenshots, etc. Every piece of useful information I can glean helps - and a real name is a factor, but it is not the main or only factor.

Of course, some people may have reasons to not use their real name: maybe they have privacy concerns, maybe they have concerns their employer or coworkers or competitors (or teachers) will see their questions and posts, maybe they have been doing this for decades and everyone knows them by their handle everywhere else, maybe they are making a political statement on the nature of former slave or colonialist or patriarchal naming conventions, maybe they are twelve years old and think it's cute.

Whatever the reason, others have no way of knowing that. If you don't use a plausible real name, you may or may not be a real person. There are already plenty of real people with real names here who are seeking help and honestly need it. If you give me reason to doubt, I move on to someone who doesn't. We are volunteers here: anything you give us to help us help you is, well, helpful. If you show us that you have made a good faith effort to investigate and figure out your issue, more people are more likely to spend their own time to help you out. Using a real name is one subtle sign of good faith (which is not to say that not using one is necessarily a sign of bad faith.)

This isn't policy. This is how the community works. In some communities, the convention of using handles / nicknames / aliases is the norm. But not in this community. And while this norm clearly originates in the wider world of education, it is strongly re-enforced by the community tradition of face-to-face Moots where we meet each other, and by the way that veterans of the community treat others.

So, when Howard or others, moderator or not, politely asks someone if they would consider using a real name, they are pointing out that our community has its way of doing things which over time we have found beneficial. You are free to ignore that way, but you should be aware of it.

I mentioned four bullet points. Not all of them refer to you.

The message that you quoted, which you addressed to me, falls under the second bullet point "this practice is actively encouraged by the moderators". In a forum that values online privacy a moderator would not request user to change their username to their real name. In fact, I consider any request addressed at a user to change their username, not matter what to (except in cases of blatantly offensive usernames), as impolite. If I asked you to change your name from "Howard" to "Peter", it would be an inherently rude request, no mater the phrasing this request would be couched in, because your name is none of my business, and it doesn't affect me in any way. But there's more to it. There's a difference between a request made between equals to a request made by a person of authority (such as a forum moderator) to a person lower in the hierarchy (such as a forum user). A request from a person of authority carries the undertones of a demand.

The other bullet point from my list of four bullet points that directly involves the moderators of this forum is the fourth one: "harassment over a non-real username is tolerated or even encouraged by the moderators". I remind you that a user popped up in the thread that started all this, and wrote to me: "I too found your pseudonym annoying." Maybe "harassment" is too strong a word to describe this enunciation; call it rudeness, then. No, it is not a "terrible abuse", as you put it, but it is, certainly, an unwarranted slighting. You, as a moderator whose goal, as you wrote me in a private message, is "to keep the forums a pleasant place to be", not only did nothing to reproach this person for this slighting, you (or possibly Mrs. Cooch; I have no way of knowing what happened behind the scenes) took down my reply to this user, in which I called him out for his rudeness. Later you informed me in a private message that you "have no interest whatever in whether you are offended or not".

Finally, the moderators are also implicitly involved in the third bullet point: the social penalty on those users not using their real name. I believe that the volunteer contributors in this forum have no obligation to answer questions, and they don't need to answer to anyone and explain why they didn't answer a given question. However, I do expect, in a forum that upholds the value of online privacy, that if a user proclaims that they are going to discriminate against other users based wholly or partly on the other user's username, this proclamation will receive the same treatment from the moderators as any other proclamation of intent to treat users deferentially based on irrelevant factors, such as gender and nationality.

I don't think that the fact that the usernames appearing in the Moodle.org forums are real-sounding is a coincidence. Based on the examples of Wikipedia and reddit, I think this would not be the case if people were choosing their usernames truly of their free wills. I think there are social forces at work that influence the users of this forum to choose their real names as their usernames. And these social forces are clearly acting in a way that is inconsistent with the value of online privacy, which I think all public collaborative websites should uphold.

I don't think we need to go there and I don't think that's necessarily productive.

There was an unfortunate misunderstanding on policy - which has been addressed now. I'd suggest we flag this thread as "locked" and if we want to split off any further broader discussion about the "offical policy" rather than the misunderstanding on how the policy is interpreted lets do that on a separate thread.