>>4112
>anon.cafelacking identity, direction
I don't consider that to be a bad thing, since it means that anyone who wants to post there is less likely to be shooed away or feel unwanted; the obvious contrast is /a/ and the non-/tg/ boards on smug, which all have the looming threat of /a/'s invisible, inconsistent moderation. Anon.cafe has definitely seen its best use as a shelter board, but I think for smaller communities that have less pressing discussion topics, it can work. Obviously I'd like it if there were more people to talk to about certain things, but that's a general webring problem.
>vanishing vs staying anonymous
It's true that he doesn't trot his nametag around like an attention whore, but he doesn't communicate as often as he should. There have been several cases in the bug reporting thread where people had to ask for weeks or months to get an answer about a simple thing, only for the fix to be very easy. The markup was broken for over a year because of a small regex typo, and if he had simply copy-pasted the contents then it could have been fixed earlier. Now the markup is functional, but the suggestion to use ++ to indicate bold has caused problems when people want to discuss the C plus plus programming language (I can't even type it correctly here because it'd cause part of my sentence to be bolded). This should also be an easy fix, but instead we just get radio silence. It's very frustrating, because I do think he genuinely wants the site to be good but just doesn't talk to us enough.
>porn dedicated boards
I'm against that too. I can browse boorus if I want to find that stuff, and every single porn board succumbs to one of three fates: becoming desolate, becoming infiltrated by faggots (NTR, interracial, /d/egeneracy, etc.), or worshipping attention whores.
>plan for future identity
I don't think so, but personally I'm not too worried. There have been only a few boards Sturgeon has been reluctant or slow to create when people ask for them, like /pol/, but everything that isn't /v/ is noticeably slower. We used to have a /tg/ (which was apparently run by Eden if you can believe it) but it was stillborn, and our /a/, /pol/, and /tech/ boards are very slow. /tech/ is semi-usable but the board is a glorified QTDDTOTT vehicle with a handful of other large threads related to pointless distro wars and the usual Linux autism.
If a site has too much focus on appealing to a broad user base or attracting many different user bases, then you wind up with something like acidchan/kikechan/8moe/whatever the fuck, which had a huge pedophile infestation for most of its lifetime (the CP on a hard drive is just free speech, guys!). They apparently recently "cleaned up" that, but they've still got boards for diaper porn, interracial porn, zoophile porn, and a few other truly subhuman fetishes.
On the other hand, you've got places like The Gunt Retort/alogs/whatever /tv/ is calling themselves these days, which are more like lightning rods for particular brands of autism and obsessive behaviour. They would pose a threat if their users were capable of doing anything beyond typing "dup kino btfo chud seethe lmao" and so on; you can always tell when one of them blows in because he's incapable of typing like a normal human being. There's something deeply disturbed about them, and they've been in a feedback loop for the last couple years since julay went down. Hopefully they all get burnt out and find more productive things to do.