Re: [tlug] Anonymous Forum Posting

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "patrick" == patrick niessen <patrick.niessen@example.com> writes:

    patrick> some companies set up anonymous forums on their intranet
    patrick> where you can supposedly voice your criticism without
    patrick> being recognised.  Practically, though people can still
    patrick> figure out who posted it due to the way english is used.
    patrick> Has anyone ever heard of a tool that can [...] take a
    patrick> gramatically correct sentence with good spelling and swap
    patrick> around some bits, so that the meaning remains as well as
    patrick> introducing some spelling mistakes?

There's an old saying: "Locks are for honest people."  Bosses
determined to punish critical or complaining subordinates _will_ find
a way to identify and attack them, not limited to cracking the
anonymous system and/or using "collective responsibility" to elicit
finking by colleagues, but that gives you some ideas in case you're
too honest to think them up yourself.  :-)

If you really want to implement this particular security measure, then
the best way to do it is to restrict the language that _can_ be used
by doing the kind of thing that universities (American and recently
some Japanese, at least) do for student evaluation of faculty.  That
is, they use multiple choice questions, and provide a space for free
form comments.

In my experience at Stanford and Ohio State University, depending on
the class, between 10% (for large introductory classes) and 65% (for
small senior seminars) of students would actually fill in the free
format comments with something.  Ie, students pretty much trusted that
there would be no reprisals (and some would write really nasty stuff,
you know, the kind of thing we would associate with alt.flame), and
the response rate correlated closely with other indicators of student
interest in the course itself.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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