Quote:
Originally Posted by Rubinski
Thought I'd add a little more about unreliable IDs.
I don't know what problems unreliable IDs cause, but I think ruling them out has problems too.
As long as the unreliable name is a verifiable ID, it shouldn't really cause any problems.
If a better name comes along, the unreliable name will still be a solid AKA.
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The problem is it creates multiple identities. This is not completely avoidable anyway, but it would lead to a proliferation of that problem. If in addition the name has a poor searchability value then people would just create named threads without checking whether they exist already, because searches create too many false positives. And then it becomes much harder to maintain the one-thread-per-model policy in general for the mods.
As an example, take 2012 mystery box
entry 406. What names have mags given to her? So far we've got: Mary P, Marilyn P, Lydia, Lisa, Alice, Joan, Sylvie, Melissa, Fran. We could have had a thread for her under all of these names (i.e. 9 of them), and possibly multiple ones for each as the searchability value of these names is low. It would be less of an issue had a mag named her (unreliably) "Walburga Dschindschichaschwili", because that name is distinctive. But creating threads just called "Lisa" is problematic anyway, as that would be difficult to find by search, and extending it to unreliable ids of this kind turns the "difficult" to "impossible".