Anonymous feature.

For EoEO. Make it possible for people to post threads anonymously. For example, let's say someone has AIDS and they need to talk about it, but they're not up for admitting who they are.

Or any other STD.
Or any other embarassing situation.
Or anything else.

I do realize an anonymizing feature can and would be abused, but we'll just have to keep an eye out and be a little more warn happy.

Well maybe this could be done but the mods would have to keep a vow of silence on the subject but still not a bad idea.

I doubt it'd work too well, and yes the feature would be overly abused, I'm sure of it.

What if a handful of profiles were made that everyone knew the passwords for so if they needed to do that then they could use them. It might be slightly hard to punish abuse though because that would stop mod's knowing too.

Although if you posted updated passwords in EoEO that would at least go someway towards protecting them.

I'm not aware of such a feature in vBulletin (anonymous posts). Why not post in 3rd person, saying its advice for someone else, or similar?

Phoenix's idea could work.

And clout, I guess I just won't post about it at all. :)

I'm not sure people could really put over how something that serious was affecting them whilst pretending to be asking for someone else. Plus people would always suspect the truth.

"My friend Linus has Gonnorhea"

The internet is already anonymous enough as it is. Has there ever actually been a problem where someone wanted to post but didn't because they wanted to be anonymous?

If someone wanted to be anonymous they would have never posted it, therefor we'd never know what could have been posted or not...

How would we know? They didn't post.

There's plenty of problems in EoEO that if I had I might not want to name names, even if I was referring to a friend of mine that someone could suspect due to the relationship I'd described myself having with them.

That may or may not have made sense, it would have been easier to have made a joke about polling people to ask if they had any embarrassing problems they wished to remain anonymous about. But what ya gonna do?

Even if they didn't post they could've gone to a staff member and complained about it. Or maybe some people who didn't post could use this thread as an opportunity to say so.

Anonymous posting would be abused like heck. I can see it being used to flame people, post porn, and generally do whatever someone would normally be scared into not doing because they know they'd get banned. I don't think anarchy is what we really need. If something is so terrible that someone doesn't want to talk about it without being anonymous, maybe they should be keeping it private to begin with? I don't know.

Or talk about it with someone they know, not internet types that are likely not to care beyond the "I know what you mean, I'm sorry to hear" jargon.

Even though it's not allowed, creating a second account is probably the best bet. It just depends on how you weigh your message board ethics versus your own desire to talk about your problem.

The only problem with your suggestion is that it's not possible. Or it probably is possible, but it would be just as hard for me as rewriting the board from scratch.