This post is meant as a fair warning for any forum user.
I was always quite open about my RL information (as in name / age / gender / location [down to City level] / passions) and I even occasionally posted some RL pictures of mine; however, I was always careful to not post any directly identifiable information that could allow some potentially bad intentioned people to track me down in real life (as in I only used my first name, not the full name / I used pictures that I didn't used on my RL social media accounts / I never post e-mail address, Skype handle, etc in open, but gave them only to people I trust). I found that to be a good compromise between openness and privacy.
However, a recent event really worried me, made me reconsider my approach and also made me create this thread in case other people find themselves in my situation. And here's what I talk about - a forum moderator (who I don't know to what other sensitive info may have access - like maybe my IP, e-mail, password) publicly admitted here that he will cash out some "favors" and use his "relations" to not only find out real life personal information about me (full name at least, but maybe even street address or ID number), which are not normally public and which I explicitly refused to shared, but also to publicly share them. I honestly don't know what his intentions are, but, really, the prospect of a stranger (a moderator, who is presumed to protect me form the "bad guys") getting access to and eventually posting out private information like my full name and who knows what else, makes me really uncomfortable.
That's why I highly recommend anyone who is also not comfortable linking their RL persona to their online / forum / ingame persona to be really careful what information they post online, because you never know when someone may decide to stalk you starting from those. Among that I recommend to never post your full name, birthday date, exact location (country is probably safe, but dunno if more than that) and, also, use a different email than your main one, as well as a different password than the one you may use on other sites. I didn't took these precautions and now things may turn ugly for me (as in the best case ending up being bothered by a few people on mail / social media and in the worst case... well, I don't even want to think about the worst case), but YOU can still prevent the same thing happening to you, if you take care of what information you share.
I was always quite open about my RL information (as in name / age / gender / location [down to City level] / passions) and I even occasionally posted some RL pictures of mine; however, I was always careful to not post any directly identifiable information that could allow some potentially bad intentioned people to track me down in real life (as in I only used my first name, not the full name / I used pictures that I didn't used on my RL social media accounts / I never post e-mail address, Skype handle, etc in open, but gave them only to people I trust). I found that to be a good compromise between openness and privacy.
However, a recent event really worried me, made me reconsider my approach and also made me create this thread in case other people find themselves in my situation. And here's what I talk about - a forum moderator (who I don't know to what other sensitive info may have access - like maybe my IP, e-mail, password) publicly admitted here that he will cash out some "favors" and use his "relations" to not only find out real life personal information about me (full name at least, but maybe even street address or ID number), which are not normally public and which I explicitly refused to shared, but also to publicly share them. I honestly don't know what his intentions are, but, really, the prospect of a stranger (a moderator, who is presumed to protect me form the "bad guys") getting access to and eventually posting out private information like my full name and who knows what else, makes me really uncomfortable.
That's why I highly recommend anyone who is also not comfortable linking their RL persona to their online / forum / ingame persona to be really careful what information they post online, because you never know when someone may decide to stalk you starting from those. Among that I recommend to never post your full name, birthday date, exact location (country is probably safe, but dunno if more than that) and, also, use a different email than your main one, as well as a different password than the one you may use on other sites. I didn't took these precautions and now things may turn ugly for me (as in the best case ending up being bothered by a few people on mail / social media and in the worst case... well, I don't even want to think about the worst case), but YOU can still prevent the same thing happening to you, if you take care of what information you share.