Given that we're supposed to be neck deep in a Masquerade event, part of me seems to remember when the information around the HA and the forumset/picture was disabled in the Masquerade forums for some reason.

I'M BEING SNEAKY!!!! Absolutely. Though my pet and sig absolutely give me away.

Can we please have the return of no sig and such on the Masq board? Thank you. XD

I find myself ambivalent about this. Subeta is a game, and as such doesn't need to match real life and being forced to be perfectly anonymous might be an interesting thing.

OTOH in RL I have been ballroom dancing and at a masked ball. At a fancy dress ball where everyone is dancing, even if folks wear the same costume they wore last year, you can't always tell. I've been to a nudist Mardi Gras, and it's pretty hard to tell who someone masked is even if you can see everything else and have done for years. Humans are wired to see faces first. And while I am not primarily visual and can tell people by their voices, a mask can distort this beyond what I can tell too.

Part of the fun of these events is that they force you to talk to people as if you've never met them before and they also force you to be cautious just in case you tell someone accidentally what you really feel about them. You can also discover that what you think is perfectly obvious about yourself is something nobody notices. Some people are more direct about whether they want you to know if it's really them or not, and you find out by dancing on the dancefloor and recognizing their moves/talking to them over the canapes.

I think it should be up to the user to choose to unleash their pet and/or leash a different pet than they usually do. I think it should be up to them to save their sig and then either delete it or replace it with a different one. This will represent in a virtual way how much of themselves they are choosing to hide. Me, I change my dance costume everyday!

I wouldn't be opposed to having the forumset, signature & leashed pet removed on the masq forums. Even with those gone, someone can super easily tell who you are just by hitting the little megaphone icon to ping you.

I wouldn't want the pinging removed because it's really useful for contests and such, but if they're going for the illusion of anonymity, I wouldn't mind having things like leashed pets and signatures hidden. I mean usernames are already hidden, so go big or go home!

I admit I like seeing people's leashed pets because I go via pets to people's accounts if they've got a nice HA I want to copy, or an item I want for myself.

I agree it seems silly to remove the username, but leave everything else in place that makes it obvious who the person is. Of course even with everything wiped out its still easy to identify people - but it takes action on your part rather than just being all out there.

As for unleashing pets and removing forum info yourself, that means all that info is also gone on the regular forums, not just on the masquerade forum and that could be annoying.

You took my point and kind of ran away with it.

I'm not suggesting removal of all identifying anything during Masq, I'm saying that back once upon a time - before the pet leashing - you only could go on the HA to identify someone until you accepted the invitation. As if that was a truly awful thing.

I'm also not saying remove HAs and I'm not going to remove my leashed pet and sig because that would be gone from the site as a whole. That's a bit ridiculous. But going back to some of the grass roots basics of Masq would be nice.

In my opinion.

it's a holiday and your dancing costume is on the site as a whole too so something not being on the site as a whole ??? and if anyone really wanted to they could find out who you are anyways via ping, or by dragging your HA into a new tab and finding your usernumber etc. Nobody is ever really anonymous here.

Some users dress up for Survival and Morostide and some of them, they change their sig and leashed pet to match. You personally may not wish to do this for Masquerade, but it's something users do. IMO I don't think it's such an imposition, if it matters to you.

Just wanted to mention - it's actually even easier to reveal someone's identity on the Masquerade forums if you want to. You can click the "ping" icon (the megaphone icon in the top right corner of their post) and the ping will have their username.