Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”.
This appears to violate the creative commons license under which Stack Overflow content is posted.
When the author asked about this:
As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.
Idk if usernames count as “attribution”, even, but I assume the results would be the same if an account was named Jeremy Assface, Ted Bundy, or Adolf Hitler even if the user’s actual name was such. Not to compare Luigi to any of those people, no, but the point is usernames are moderated.
usernames are the only form of attribution that makes sense and has ever been used (aside from email, which is again practically a username)