Hi John,

Welcome again to the EarthWaves board. This is a somewhat protected posting area. And when posting notes here you do not need to be too defensive with regard to most people's comments including mine, in my opinion. There are times when someone might think that because I disagree with something they said it represents criticism. But instead it is usually simply technical information being exchanged. Certain conversations do tend to get personal for some reason. But I would not expect you to get involved in those types of exchanges.

Regarding the use of "Pen Names," I have explained this a number of times in notes posted here. But since you yourself just started posting notes here I will go over this again. And these are personal opinions which are based on years of having these types of discussions with people.

When you attempt to forecast earthquakes and even when you discuss the subject of forecasting earthquakes it can generate quite a bit of controversy for a number of different reasons. And some of what is said can be highly damaging to people's personal lives and their careers. People regularly discuss earthquake forecasting in notes posted to this bulletin board. And it can be important to limit the amount of damage which can result from that. Here is an example. And in discussing this I will point out that I have never met and do not know anyone named "Jane Doe."

Someone posting earthquake forecasts to the board uses the name "Jane Doe." Fine. However, a person with that same name might be an employee of the U.S. government working in an embassy building is some country which is frequently hit by earthquakes such as Indonesia. Some Indonesia residents decide that the EarthWaves Jane Doe is also the person working for the embassy. And they are upset by those forecasts. Denials are repeatedly made by embassy staff. But it does no good. There is a heated discussion in Indonesia newspapers. And the poor woman has to change her name or risk being told that she can no longer work at the embassy. She has become too controversial even though she has nothing to do with the EarthWaves board.

So, for the safety of all it may be best to simply use a Pen Name. In this case Jane Doe could have used JD or Jane D etc. and there would never have been any trouble.

You yourself have a distinct identity which is linked with your employer. And you are not posting earthquake forecasts here as far as I can see. So that may work for you. But that is not the case for everyone. Each person needs to decide what is best for him or her.

I myself use one Pen Name here and another in the Newsgroups etc. because some of the notes posted to this board can get pretty heated. And I do not want those types of discussions having an impact outside this board. EQF is short for "EQ-Forecasting" which is the base address of one of my Web sites. I found it almost impossible to avoid typos when trying to enter that longer Pen Name in note headings. The text of most of my notes is usually prepared with a word processor which automatically checks for spelling errors. The notes are then copied to Canie's Web page entry form.

Finally on this, in the hopes of avoiding an argument regarding the use of Pen Names I will say that based on past experiences I suspect that there may be some complaints about this. And I am going to point out beforehand that I feel that this has already been discussed in enough detail. And it is not too likely that I will say much more about it.

ADDITIONAL - BULLETIN BOARD NOTE FORMATS

If you need to store a URL or some evenly spaced text such as a data table within the body of an EarthWaves bulletin board note then you might ask me for some info on how to do that. It can be a little tricky. For unknown reasons, the procedure which I believe Canie uses to do that does not work with my own computer programs. And I would expect that this is also the case with some other people's programs.

These are personal opinions.