Should Microcosm show the real identity of users?

Eh? What? It's a bad point... as it creates an idea of a collective work (which is what a community is, it's what a conversation with many participants is) and tries to apply many instances of individual control over it.

It's confusing, illogical, and tries to enforce broken ideas from social networks onto forums.

The privacy/permissions of a forum have always been at the scope of the forum in which you participate. Not the site... but the forum itself... forum67.html for example.

All of that still exists, will still exist, and if anything has become far more clear and strictly enforced.

I think we're talking about two different things, probably because I'm talking about something tangential to the discussion that Ramaye and CYOA are having rather than that conversation directly but without explicitly stating that I've changed context.

I'm considering events on a timeline thusly:

1. user joins forum as "bothwell", posts lots of things for a few years as "bothwell", secure in the knowledge that to the casual observer those posts will forever be associated with bothwell and nobody else
   
2. one day the forum owner decides to change the way the software works so that all posts are now associated with some kind of verifiable identity
   
3. "bothwell" is now no longer just "bothwell" but is also exposed as Realname O'Genuine and all those historical posts are associated with this new, expanded identity - unless "bothwell" fancies starting again as somebody else