I told you last month about the Star’s new initiative to encourage constructive and civil conversation online and invited you to share your comments — respectfully of course.

For the most part, the discourse about this issue was indeed respectful and thoughtful, indicative of readers’ strong engagement with the Star across all its platforms.

Readers made many good points about the vexing issue of online civility — or incivility, as has sadly too often been the norm in past years — with many fixing on a key question I have wondered about many times since the Star launched online commenting in 2008.

Why does the Star publish anonymous comments at all?

Readers repeatedly asked why the Star’s requirements for publishing online comments are not in line with the long-held practices of the newspaper’s Letters page, where those who want to voice their views must publicly identify themselves.

“To ease the tensions and conflict between ‘civil discourse and freedom of expression,’ why not simply make everyone sign their real name and address, just like they have to in order to get a letter to the editor printed in the paper edition?” M.A. Baker commented. “Everyone who complies with the rules and signs their own name gets published. Problem solved. Simple!”

Many readers told me they believe the Internet’s culture of anonymity and fake names is largely responsible for the reality that too much online discourse is nasty, rude, insensitive and even bullying.

“Although cowardly, ‘anonymity’ has become socially acceptable on the Internet but has done absolutely nothing to elevate the level of online respectful and civil discussion amongst readers,” David Honigsberg wrote in a letter to the editor.

Reader Tate Abols concurred. “I believe if people want to participate in a public conversation, they must do so publicly,” he told me in an email.

The Star’s new commenting system seeks to engage commenters themselves in its mission to promote civil discourse among the many thousands of engaged readers who want to share their views on news and public issues. While most comments submitted are now posted, the system provides tools to allow readers to flag questionable comments for further review by the Star’s moderators.

Commenters must register with thestar.com but they don’t have to provide their real names to join the conversation. While some news organizations have experimented with requiring the real names of commenters, I’m not aware of any news organization in North America that does so now.

I asked Digital Editor John Ferri why the Star and other news organizations have allowed the Internet’s culture of anonymity to prevail in online commenting.

Ferri explained the practical problems of verifying names online. As we well know, anyone can be anyone on the Internet.

“It’s relatively easy to fake an account. Facebook, which requires real names, has estimated that almost 9 per cent of its users are fake,” Ferri said. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to devise a registration process that makes it easy for readers to sign up and yet screens out all the fakes.”

There are also concerns about identify theft. As commenter “Matt 99” pointed out, “There are some very valid safety concerns when you put your complete identification on the web.”

Ferri understands that concern but adds that the culture of anonymity is about more than fear of identity theft. “It’s an outgrowth of the earlier days of the Internet, when the consensus was that anonymity helped nurture innovation on the web and made it harder for corporations and governments to shape and control its growth.”

As a result, “the culture of the avatar and fake name has become deeply entrenched,” he said.

Ferri told me this issue is open for discussion at the Star. Moving forward, he and his team hope to experiment with opening some topics for commenting only to those who identify themselves with real names.

While the Star’s digital team has put considerable and commendable effort into creating a “Community Code of Conduct” that spells out in clear terms this news organization’s expectations that commenters who want to have their say within the Star remain civil, Ferri well understands the concerns of those who believe that anonymity contributes to the incivility we abhor.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that requiring real names would reduce trolling,” he said.

There is also little doubt that requiring real names on comments would discourage some from commenting within the Star. To that I ask, on balance, seeking civil discourse here, does that really matter?