I have no problem identifying myself to a mod or any other higher person on the forum, but I like my privacy too, and would not like my real name displayed, as on my FB account my private details are also very private. Thus I prefer the nickname use, but still I do not pretend who I am not, but myself, open and honest.

I have huge difficulty in understanding why this is at all an issue? In the world outside the forum you are known by your real name and held accountable for the reputation that comes with the mention of that name. Why not have the same on the forum? To hide behind a nickname and "false persona" gives you false confidence to say whatever the hell you want.

As some of you may know I was in a little hot water this last week and rightly it was "Zane Botha" that took the flack not "Jack Sparrow23" or some other false persona. I took the responsibility, owned up to it and had nothing to hide behind.

And on the forum I use my real name so immediately people knew what was going on. Why would you not want to be held accountable for what you do or say, even if it is on a forum?

Another point-surely you aim to meet, socialize and do business with other people on the forum? Real names would logically follow and assist all of that.....

I can't believe there's a discussion about this, what the hell is so bad about using you're real names, are people arguing on this subject just for the sake of arguing, out of all the arguments I've seen on the forum this must be the most immature and pointless argument.

Problem with online forums / presence is that the information can be hacked / stolen / sold.
This gives some clever people the ability to build a profile of a person and by retrieving small bits of information from different online sites the profile will contain a lot of personal info on one person. This profile can then obviously be used for all kinds of criminal activities.

In the real world this can happen as well but not as easily and it is a much more manual process, thus a bit saver to hand out personal info in the real world, thus using nick names and providing false full names on forums etc. is a way of protecting oneself.

The above might sound like conspiracy theory type of talk but there actually exists software that can crawl the web and gather such information and write it into databases.

Because you give out you're name a person can make a whole profile? Anyone in the world can get hold of your name if they want to, everyone relax, it's a forum, stop getting uptight about something so stupid, and the people that are worried I'm pretty sure their facebook account isn't set to absolute privacy mode, I'm sure you've put down you're info to other site, companies sell all you're information off so you can get random emails, putting your name on a forum will not do anything. Relax and stop arguing for the sake of arguing.

Just out of interest, I have read many articles in the past few months of private and personal information being hacked off of very secure sites such as Facebook, PSN, Yahoo, etc.
With this, and many more things, in mind that I won't get into now I shut down all of my social media accounts.

I am not opposed to using my full name but that's all I would be willing to divulge as far as personal details is concerned.
As suggested already perhaps the nick can stay as is with the persons full name in a smaller font below it. Seem a decent compromise. That being said it could also be as simple as leaving it how it is at the moment with your full name and surname being a requirement when creating a profile and this info being only available to the mods. That way if a dispute arises the mods can accertain who the person really is. How this would help I'm not sure as I don't know of anyone willing to seek legal action due to some comment made on a forum.

Just for the record my nick is sk27, s for Steven, k for Knoetze and 27 represents the MotoGP rider I support's race number.