Prathyush

I've replied to your comment edit, I think it should ping you:

http://www.physicsoverflow.org/29079

I am sorry I went crazy regarding anonymity, but independent of this episode, moderation under real names is valuable as a rule, because it prevents anonymous referees from getting elected, and reviewing people's reviews without any accountability. It's a reasonable general rule, but my motivations were crappy (and I knew they were crappy, this is why I revealed them). It was NOT an attempt to force deanonymization of anyone, it came with no threat, it was just an attempt to get the moderation team to rearrange itself to have only named members.

Regarding your reply to me on Yiyang's "resignation" question, that's already the case - moderator reviews are handled by the community, and moderators are told this (through a moderator manual) when they're elected.

Look, please talk to people about their experience with moderation on this and similar sites before drafting anything--- if you are coming into this with no experience of moderation on sites of this sort, you have no idea what kind of demons dwell there. It's like hell on Earth.

I don't think you are aware of the degree to which the publishing world allows fraudulent ideas to dominate without challenge for decades at a time. I'll refer you to a nice example--- here's an answer of mine on English Usage stackexchange regarding Allen Walker Read's etymology of the word "ok": http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17/where-did-the-term-ok-okay-come-from

My answer there is currently at +1, it was negative for a long time. The current top answer is at +35, but if you leave it there, with time, it will be at negative score (because it is factually wrong). The point of the internet is to allow the long review of material, to correct wrong consensus in the literature. There are dozens of such terrible wrong consensus views which are corrected relatively quickly online. I can give you half a dozen more where consensus is busted: Abiogenic petroleum, Marlovian Authorship, intranuclear RNA computation, epigenetics, radiation hormesis, etc etc. These are quickly resolved when you don't have censorship, as people in a free discussion quickly realize that the consensus view is wrong.

In physics, there are many examples too: Davies explanation of the arrow of time, S-matrix theory, large extra dimensions, black hole entropy in loop quantum gravity, etc etc. All of these need to be discussed without censorship, and allowing the sides to be scathing in the criticism, because sometimes this is the only way to break through a cloud of false authority.

Regardless, this website was founded on the principle of free discussion without moderator abuse, and I hope you are happy with it.