The jury's out on whether sites like Ragan.com should require people who comment on articles to sign their names

There’s a bit of an internal debate raging at Ragan right now. Well, “raging” may be a bit strong. But people are talking about something. Here’s the scoop: On Ragan.com, we recently enabled a function that allows people to comment on any article they read out there. This is the way of the world now, and we need to practice what we preach, right? And, just like at most blogs and other social networking sites, you can choose to be anonymous if you want to be. That’s what started the debate. One of the articles posted was a tad bit controversial, and it generated a bunch of comments, and many of them were pretty rough and mean; and all of the ones that were rough and mean were, you guessed it, anonymous.

Is that what we want? Do we want people hiding behind anonymity? Will the fact that they don’t have to put their name on something lower the level of discourse? After all, it’s hard to be rough and mean when you have to take responsibility for your words. It’s real easy to throw comment bombs when you’re just another “Anonymous” posting out there.

We want to hear what our readers think about this, but it seems to us that there are pros and cons to allowing anonymous postings. The pros: People will feel safe enough to speak out on a variety of topics. What if a communicator has a jerky boss who happens upon the Ragan site and sees his employee out there having heated discussions? Might that communicator get in trouble for “wasting time” at work, playing on a social media site? So allowing anonymity will no doubt bring more people into the discussions. But there’s a downside, too. As we’ve said, allowing anonymity will, in certain cases, drag the discussion into the gutter, as unprofessional people will use the cloak of anonymity to throw bombs, hurl insults and otherwise take the conversation off track.

Ragan CEO Mark Ragan summed up the debate this way: “This is a really tough question. I come from the newspaper world where signatures are required on every letter to the editor. But as the publisher of a Web site for internal communicators, I am more interested in robust debate than holding readers to a strict identity clause. And, as all of us know, many communicators can’t visit social and professional networking sites, much less comment on them. In a perfect world, communicators could find another job if they weren’t free to express their opinions openly at their current one. Unfortunately, most people don’t have those options. Let’s continue to debate this issue. Ragan.com is new. There are many editorial policies under review. This is one of them.”

Readers, what say you? Should Ragan.com allow anonymity? Or should comments be treated like letters to the editor, and only the “signed” ones will be published?