Consulting Requirements: Forum Guidelines for Oracle Consultants Don Burleson

Note:  In addition to these guidelines, make sure to review our Dress Code, etiquette requirements, Cross-Cultural Guidelines, forum guidelines and obfuscation requirements.

The Internet has become a very dangerous place today with huge issues relating to verifiable identity. This anonymity issue is the most prevalent in the area of Oracle forums, message boards and chat rooms where participants impersonate others and hurl profanity with free abandon.  See my article Evaluating the credibility of Oracle information for details.

Robert Freeman notes in his blog titled "Evil People": 

There are evil people in the world. I firmly believe this, and it's evidenced every day. You will notice on my blog that one of these evil people has appeared. How can we tell this person is evil?

1. The posts were anonymous.
2. The posts were unkind and out of context.
3. The posts were presumptuous, at best.

Mike Ault also notes:

Others seem to enjoy laying about with wild abandon when someone is mistaken, falling all over each other like the spider creatures eating their wounded in the remake of "Lost In Space".

They seem to enjoy laying scorn and abuse on others. This behavior is counter productive and leads to outright fear on the part of many neophytes about writing papers, posting answers or helping anyone anywhere online.

Many large corporations prohibit employees from participating in forums and chat rooms because of the potential liability exposures from web criminals.  Consultants working for Burleson Consulting are warned not to participate in any forum, message board or blog where participants are not positively identifiable via an affirmative check such as a credit card (Amazon real-person) a CSI number (MOSC) or our DBA forum (where our moderator can quickly control criminal and defamatory acts). Many continue to operate your own blogs and carefully monitor comments and promptly remove any comments that are negative or defamatory.

Recent problems with identity theft and biased moderators have led to a situation where anonymous criminals might publish serious accusations:

• Anonymous people have accused our consultants and authors of criminal plagiarism and theft of intellectual property.
   

• Our authors have been falsely accused of dishonesty and fabrication because they are required to obfuscate performance evidence from clients.
   

• Criminals have taken to identity theft, impersonating authors and consultants.

In a recent criminal case we have worked with the FBI to obtain subpoenas to track IP addresses, but we are often met with dead-ends where the malicious crook was using open relays or unsecured wireless networks. In another case, the offender was found to be judgment proof (poor), and the threat of civil damages would not stop their egregious behavior.

Non-anon only

To reduce the exposure from these acts we have suggested that all Internet-based interaction take place within a controlled environment where participants can be positively identified. Because many web criminals will register for these message boards using anonymous hotmail accounts and connect to the web via an open-relay, we cannot allow participation in these forums. Examples on non-verified ID forums include the DBAZine blogs and comment areas, the asktom web site and the Usenet Newsgroups.