Mav, with all due respect that is Horseshit. NP has a high percentage of Pros and is one of the least "noisy" sites out there today. Do they require/enforce real names? No. So how do they do it? Simple. The owner is a pro who runs a hedge fund and rules the site with an Iron Fist. There are no vendors. The rules are simple, and if you "step out" you get "blended" rather quickly. This is what keeps the site troll free. Some choose to use their real names, or their identity is obvious by association with the books/papers that they have published, but the vast majority do not.
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What exactly is horseshit? You are not implying that if posters on a given section of this message board registered with their real names that it would be full of the same trolls of the normal ET are you? For the record, I'm aware someone posting under a real name that does not require civility out of them. Facebook is proof of that. What ET Pro would do is create a much smaller more serious community for those people who "choose" to engage in a more intellectual dialogue regarding trading. I have no doubt that a majority of traders on this site would choose NOT to participate in that forum. And nobody can make them. But the type of person who would "choose" to register is probably the type of person who would make an effort to be a value add for the thread. There are many sites out there that don't require real names have that serious dialogues. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. But those communities were created and marketed to be that way, this site was not. I hope you understand the nuance of that.
Yes I do understand that, however providing a real name on a public message board, albeit ETPro, is IMHO asking for trouble. Yes, I know tons of people do it on facebook, that however does not make it right, and as you correctly point out we have seen the lack of "civility" there too. For me, the preferable solution would be to clamp down hard on the stealth vendors, the bullshit artists and the ones engaging in truly threatening behaviour. The approach on NP works.