Not to mention that all of your posts on meta are gone.

!

(Sorry, that was a Jeeves & Wooster joke. <gets coat>)

Please do not do that. It renders threads unintelligible.

What does fpqc stand for?

It is a very fine topology on the category of schemes. I use fine here in both senses. Ah ha ha!

I had good reason to do this. I used my real name because I trusted that the community would be equally honest and forthcoming with me. I feel that some people have abused their anonymity. It was my intention to remove some of my personal information from this site.

I'm sorry if you don't agree with my methods, but I refuse to have my name abused any further.

@Stephen: I think the community has shown an incredible amount of patience and fairness to fpqc. Many people, including Kevin Buzzard, Emerton, Pete, and the moderators have devoted their valuable time to explain politely to him the damaging consequences of his actions, both to the community and to himself. I myself have never downvoted his questions and answers based on who he is, and I think neither have most regular users. In fact, his reputation on MO is not far behind Terry Tao (: . It can only happen in a virtual world!

If anything, I think mathematicians often focus too much on the mathematical ability of our colleagues and forget to encourage them to become more decent member of the community. This habit has cost us, in my opinion, both internally and with respect to the perception of our profession from society.

I use my real name to force myself to be more disciplined on MO. As a consequence, I have to learn to write better and think more carefully about the content of my questions, answers and comments. Public participation on MO has helped me to improve professionally and I believe undergraduate and graduate students would benefit more from using their real names than not.

@fqpc. I see your point. In MO or in meta I too was anonymous and I have felt guilty at times for hiding behind a pseudonym and being impolite. If you would like, I am willing to change any references I have made to your real name, to fpqc. I obviously cannot find all my posts with your name; but I can do it for the threads in the front page, or anything major I remember.

Dear Hailong,

I completely agree with the sentiment of your second paragraph, with the first sentence of your first paragraph, and with the sentiment of the first two sentences of your third paragraph.

However, I tend to disagree with the sentiment of the rest, which seems to be:

(1) That fpqc deserves whatever real-world consequences his MO behavior produces. I remember being 20. I did much stupider things, and was fortunate to avoid suffering long term consequences.

(2) That undergraduates (I'm ready to cede you graduate students) such as fpqc benefit more from using their real names than not.
Individual undergraduates are extremely unlikely to benefit much from using their real names on MO, and if they are annoying enough may do themselves real harm. On the other hand, it's probably true that anonymity will make them more annoying on average, so that for the community as a whole it would be better if everyone used their real names. I see this tension as a real problem, and I agree that it's debatable what the right solution is.

So my disagreement with you, such as it is, is not very great. I certainly understand the point you are making.

Best,
Stephen

I do not see in what way is the voting system inconsistent with anything. We all attach 'votes' to other people's work (and is some cases, to those people themselves) as part of our daily work. The only thing 'new' here is that MO makes the value attached to one's constributions be explicit, and shared.

Of course, interpreting MO 'reputation' as anything other that MO reputation is likely to cause confusion. But interpreting anything incorrectly is likely to cause confusion.

@Igor Korepanov.

Glad to see you back in MO. Welcome again!

Dear Stephen,

You wrote:

However, I tend to disagree with the sentiment of the rest, which seems to be: (1) That fpqc deserves whatever real-world consequences his MO behavior produces. I remember being 20. I did much stupider things, and was fortunate to avoid suffering long term consequences.

I don't think I express that view about real-world consequence in my post at all. But I am glad we agreed on the bigger picture.

As another 20 year old MO user, I'd say undergrads should feel free to use their real names. I think an undergrad who is already seriously interested in math tends to be a far more mature and dedicated person than an average member of my age group, so there is much less danger of ruining one's name than you fear. Also, I consider myself an "average" math undergrad (i.e., not on par with fpqc or Qiaochu) and therefore, probably one of the least knowledgeable regular MO users - and everyone seems to tolerate my questions, so I don't think undergrads would be annoying other MO users in that way either.

Dear Zev,

You are of course, right: many (the majority, I hope, though I have to confess I don't know how many UGs are here) of undergraduates who use their real names here are not annoying. I didn't mean to imply that they were. I just think that undergrads, at least, should not feel the least bit guilty for posting anonymously. Then if they do happen to annoy someone who will at some point make a decision about admission to grad school, or a postdoc, or a job, they haven't done themselves real harm.

Best,
Stephen

There are, to my count, five reasonably active undergraduates on MO, all of which (except fpqc, now) use their real names, and I would like to think we aren't being too annoying :) On the other hand, the evidence from the last thread points to that troll from awhile back being an undergraduate, so I can see the concern there.

@fpqc. You didn't respond to my offer to replace your real name with fpqc, in my recent posts in meta.