Changes between Initial Version and Version 3 of Ticket #14682

Timestamp:

08/24/10 17:02:17 (3 years ago)

Author:

jane

Comment:

1. If someone really wants to remain anonymous, they shouldn't enter their real email into any web form, regardless of whether it will be published or not, because the site owner will always have access to it and there have been plenty of cases where an unscrupulous author has published a commenter's email address.

2. The site owner chooses whether to enable gravatar or not.

3. The theme decides whether gravatars will be shown or not.

I think the scenario you outline is a case where the burden of anonymity should fall on the commenter; if they don't want their identity to be findable, they shouldn't be using their real identity to leave comments. Will some site owners kill those comments b/c they don't seem to have a real person behind them? Sure. But it's up to the site owner: WordPress puts the power in the site owner's hands. Someone unwilling to let their identity be known may have valid reasons for wanting to hide, but that edge case shouldn't be determining functionality.

"the software should be changed so that gravatars are not used for these sorts of posts" << what sorts of posts? the software should not be changed. And the text that is displayed about it can be left to the theme.