29 July - Total anonymity leads to confusion
Messages sent via the Bonkers’ Contact Form
arrive as if they have been sent by me to myself; absolutely no identifying information
is included unless the sender decides to include it. It is a mixed blessing and I have just been
painfully reminded of that fact.
All incoming messages are filed under the sender’s name or pseudonym but the totally
anonymous get dumped in a single folder labelled ‘Anonymous’. I made an exception
last year for a series of significant messages claiming to come from within Bexley council.
The first such message that made me believe it was different from the run of the mill
anonymous arrived in October 2011 and the last that I thought to be in the same category
was very nearly three months ago.
The new Obscene Blog Timeline refers to anonymous messages and it has
regrettably upset someone. An anonymous informant has written to say (s)he never ever mentioned the
Obscene Blog and may therefore believe my account to be false. The writer is most
definitely not happy with any implication that good information was provided initially, instilling confidence,
and the later inaccuracies may have been more than simply unfortunate.
The new message has compelled a reassessment of the situation and I am kicking myself
for overlooking an alternative scenario; that two (it could be more but
I shall discount the possibility) well connected council insiders were messaging me over
the same period but only one took an interest in the Obscene Blog.
I filed a total of 53 incoming messages under ‘Council anonymous’ in six months
and came to believe them all to be the product of one author. That was wrong, grouping
anonymous messages to unnamed individuals can never be an exact science but when
writing the Timeline I lost sight of the fact that my message filing was only a
best guess. There is little consolation in the complaining
informant making the same assumption that (s)he was unique.
The Timeline has been modified. The changes are few because it will always be true
that certain names were anonymously named but there is no longer an assumption that all
messages were from a single source.
If anyone is tempted to send an anonymous message in future it would be helpful to allocate
themselves a pseudonym and stick to it, thereby much reducing the opportunity for confusion
and unintended offence.