I suggested overcomingbiaschan as a joke, but I am warming to the idea of anonymity. It seems to me that most forum software is a bad comprise between identity and anonymity, since it allows people with no lives to create alternate online personalities that they become hugely invested in, and useful discussions become swamped by people's need to nurture these electronic alter-egos. So rather than compromising, pick an extreme. Either ask people to pay a token fee to join the forum and ask that they use their real names, or use an ultra-minimalist anonymous...
>If you'd like ways to avoid offending feminists? I'd start with the header image on this blog. Oh noes, the harpies/feminists are coming to get us, and actually listening to them drives men mad!
Forget the feminists, I'm worried about offending the classicists. Why are there harpies where there ought to be sirens? Schoolboy error!
Christianity, for instance, is somewhat less absurd than Norse creation myth only when it skips the actual mechanics of the creation, so it seems a tad harsh to single out that poor cow for a hard time. From the viewpoint of psychological bias, the main point of interest I can see is that of religionists being so forgiving about errors in what should explain the hows and whys of existence.
Some more thoughts:
The poor quality of discussion on Digg, Reddit and Slashdot demonstrate, I think, that user-moderation is ultimately a bad system that tends toward in-groups and lowest-common-denominator discussion topics. A notable exception is Hacker News, and I think this is mostly to do with the community emphasis on simple rules like "be polite", and the close link between community and moderators. I remember recently the administrator of HN, Paul Graham, made a thread asking whether links to election stories should be banned from HN. A s... (read more)