The reply I received from the moderator is as follows.
“If you use pictures and claim that they're you, verification would give other people the ability to feel confident that they really are you.”
You do not need to post your pic here is correct.
However, you would need to post your pic to be verified, receive a check mark.
The pic is what is verified. No pic, nothing to verify.
That's not correct - verification would just require some kind of live, face-to-face interaction with a moderator, either at a gathering or by video chat (for example using your phone.)
You wouldn't have to post anything publicly, or share anything about yourself with anyone.
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I mentioned pictures because one of the things we often see here is brand new (mostly female but occasionally male) accounts with tons of pictures of themselves.
The pictures are just stolen from somewhere on the internet, probably some random person's social media account. So what I meant was that in THOSE cases, where someone DOES have pictures, if they are verified, you could be reasonably confident that the pictures are really theirs.
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We have a problem here with people creating multiple identities and using them to interact with people in a fake way.
For example, someone will create a female identity and use it to flirt with people in the chatroom. Then if things go wrong, or they don't get the response they wanted, they abandon that account and create a second, different female identity. And they chat with the same people they chatted with the first time, while pretending to be someone completely different. I've banned trolls who had three or four separate fake accounts.
It's very unfair to the people they're talking to, who might think they're making a real connection with a real person.
Verification would be a way of saying "I can be reasonably confident that this person chatting with me is an actual human being instead of just one of someone's multiple fake identities."
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You could be verified and not post pictures because, again, all that's being verified is that you're a person who can have a face-to-face conversation with a moderator. In other words, that you're NOT some guy pretending to be a fake identity (or several of them in some cases.)
But if you're just here using the forum normally and not posting pictures of yourself or trying to meet people, you might decide you don't care about verification at all, and just ignore it.
Which would be completely fine and you'd never notice a difference, the forum would be exactly the same for you as it is right now.
