Staying anonymous on mumsnet

[ipsos]

Hi,

I wondered if I could ask for a spot of advice about using mumsnet safely?

I love that we are anonymous on here and that we can discuss all these difficult situations safely. I especially like this relationship forum where people help with such difficult problems. However, I worry about what would happen if we all suddenly lost our anonymity. For example, when the hackers get into the mumsnet computers and pinch all the data we could just all lose our anonymity overnight. The hackers could put all our discussions online with our proper names listed instead of our nicknames and a lot of people could suddenly find themselves in hot water (perhaps with the controlling partners that we hear about on here).

I haven't posted much that's really interesting, but a lot of people post stuff on relationships that is very personal, and that could get them in difficulties if their anonymity was blown.

I just wondered if anyone had come up with any unwritten rules about how to stay safe here? I know that Mumsnet will delete individual posts if asked, but I get the feeling that they are not that keen to do that, and they say they don't delete whole posting histories as it messes up the threads.

I just wondered if anyone had thought this through and worked out how to keep vulnerable people out of trouble in the event of a serious hack?

How do you do this with the same e-mail address?

I've wondered that, too, but not for this site specifically. I am in the states and when there is a mass shooter, the media finds the shooter's posts on, say, Reddit, where they use random user names, like it is here on this site. How did they know it was the shooter's account?

So, really, is anything anonymous on the internet?

@fleurneige , whilst logged in go to "Settings":
https://www.mumsnet.com/settings/account

You should see "Change username" as an option. Just type in a new username and save!

I'm on laptop and it might be different if you're on a phone.