I'll give you a hint- Male in his 20s.

I also know better than to judge by age;

Considering it's not too hard to gauge maturity by the content of one's post- regardless of how old that person turns out to be.

I've become quite good at knowing if a post is going to contained reasoned arguments, emotional rants or poorly-articulated philosophical waffle in less than a second, without needing some form of labeling to assist me.

And I might add, I've reached the point where I can tell these beyond spelling and grammatical errors (very intelligent arguments may come just as often from choppy sentences with spelling mistakes as the person might just be bad with a keyboard or speak English as a second language).

Why stop at age and sex, what about place of birth, education, religion, body shape, hair colour and all of the other likely suspects that can be used to stereotype and make an argument out of an otherwise illuminating and fun discussion?

Well said, Cornflower.

I'm totally against the age idea. Seems to be totally counterproductive IMHO.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were each just assigned a new number in each thread, purely for the purposes of referencing someone's argument. That way, people would be utterly anonymous. Arguments solely based on content.
All too often, we see a poster's moniker and forget their argument.

I can say I try at times to take each argument as it comes. There have even been a few occasions when I've found myself agreeing with people who I've shared rather venomous arguments with.

Though at other times, I've gotten in stoushes annoyingly quickly.

Alas however, I fear my number idea wouldn't work. People are too used to arguing with set names, and I think many would get bored quickly and leave OLO in the event it was reduced solely to arguments based upon content.

But ages or any other identifiers would be a step in the wrong direction.

Cornflower, TRTL,

Tangential to this discussion, have you, or anybody else for that matter, been getting the little OLO pop-up survey recently?

It isn't terribly intrusive, and does offer an 'I prefer not to answer this question' option in most cases. I forget as to upon what thread I encountered it, but it was within the last 24 hours.

I imparted little that could not be deduced from my posting history, as I prefer to maintain my anonymity for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is to prevent easy labelling by the labellers amongst the denizens of OLO, a labelling that in my case could perhaps be greatly facilitated by any knowledge as to my real name.

Given that, of self-evident necessity, many of the discussions on OLO are political in nature, I see the anonymity that is to an extent possible on OLO as a means to the overcoming of 'party discipline' in debate on any matter. The merit, or lack of it, in any proposition should derive from the quality of the argument presented, rather than the reputation or connections of the poster that may be involved.

Got a laugh from Cornflower's reference to, amongst other things, hair colour, being used in any postulated poster profiling. There are connotations in any name, Cornflower. Please tell me you're not blonde. On the other hand, don't.

Some surprising stuff in this thread, never knew suzeonline had been insulted because she is female.
And Indy no offense but you tied a knot in the threads tail surely?
We do talk about a better fairer world.
We put our wants and wishes out there daily.
Age sex beliefs , have no impact on my thoughts.
Now forest, my comments are often political, sometimes sharply against the dills running NSW, my party.
But afraid they know me, put my open condemnation of their dreadful treatment of my party in the too hard basket.
If we want to be honest, truly honest, in the history of my time here I often had no idea of some posters age even sex but knew if they had anything to contribute after a few posts.

So, it seems that there really is no hope for the age and sex issue. Individual, is there anything else you could add that might change are views? I am genuinely intrigued as to whether you still think it's a good idea..