In the form of how is organised Lu-La, I think this is a natural place for this kind of debate.
Now it is clearly separate from the MF tech orientated.
There is no perfect way to do things, good way is enough. In the MF, there is a section about "displaying your professional works" or something like that,
I guess not all the pics come from MF cameras, so why should this section be there? It is just fine. At the end, a forum or any place has its own natural way of functioning regardless to the labels. It results that the MF forum is where most of the pros are watching and posting.
I'm also 100% in favor of using our real names. When I say that, I'm including also the real name that one uses commercially because sometimes some people use pseudos in their real life. I'm convinced that it will increase the quality of the content in all aspects.
Some are pointing that if private, we could be more relaxed and tempted to go deeper in delicate aspects of the profession, I think on the contrary that when you make things public under your name it is another story.
For example, I've seen here some Michael's articles very very politically uncorrect. Some, frankly, where very delicate and could have had a lot of implications. I'm thinking of the old Kodak 35mm FF as a good example. Responsability is the word that comes in my mind. If I write under a funny name, I can say any funny thing, but when it is under your name, you are responsable for your writings and I thing that is a great thing.
I just realised how powerfull is that recently. I wrote a thread here some time ago where I was condamning a brand, thinking that 3 people would see it. later, a day I did a search in google about that brand and my thread appeared in the first places. That really impressed me, and I thought that it is not just about writing, it is about writing right.
What we put here have consequences, and that is a 2 side sword.
When I realised that, I erased a funny picture of a "Leica Clouseau inspector" that I did for the fun one day. But, was that post necessary? No. How could it affect a brand image? I would never have thought that we have this power, but we do. My pic was just for fun, but it could be interpretated differently and then, the images are circulating, the words are writen. It is not just about being in between us and make our cofee conversation. It is all about posting the best we can
and being aware that we are responsable of the content. It will be seen by a lot of people. We do that in our website with our images, but our writings here have exactly the same weight.
As BC says, we all have good reasons to bark against the situation. I've been doing it, I've been listenning too much so far about the same stories, arrownd me, every day got some bad news from people I know about how bad etc...if this was a private forum, that is where we would go.
But that does not lead us at the end to nowhere if not worse and the answer of Bcooter is also the only that I know, that I beleive and that'm applying right now.
Transparency (public forum) will force us to think twice before posting, but think twice is better than not thinking at all IMHO.