Fiction Suits
From Barbelith
What is a Fiction Suit?
Grant Morrison coined the term “fictionsuit,” and every time it was used in The Invisibles it seemed to have a slightly different meaning. In the context of Barbelith Underground, it's simply an online name - or more properly, an online persona.
Originally - in more naive times - Tom actively encouraged using multiple fiction suits on the board as a way of presenting different aspects of yourself without worrying too much about the contradictions. As small-g grant has said:
Some people prefer to use "fiction suit" to indicate something deeper than a mere "persona" or "mask" - more like a conduit for a different internal character to come to life, a "suit" worn by a specific personality, which may or may not jibe with the "wearer's" meatspace (or "real") persona. This outlook can be useful for those involved with certain magickal or psychological experiments, or for those who just need very badly to cut loose for a while.
Unfortunately, after a while we experienced our first of several visitations by large groups of travelling trolls. When this happened the problem of being able to stop people posting even after they had been banned became a very serious issue - and so for a while the board was closed to new members, and people were asked to abandon any spare suits they might have. Now, while membership is open again, it is generally considered good practice to have only one registered login. So, although you might change your on-screen name, and your personality and method of presentation, you would have the same user number and the same login name and password.
“Burning” a suit, that is asking to have a login name and password deleted, is these days generally seen as a symbol of protest. Most people don’t bother, which is one reason why the numbers of users on Barbelith are far greater than the apparent number who post. If you have more than two login names and passwords, don’t be surprised or upset if one of them is deleted by Tom (see below); although as long as there seems to be nothing malicious in multiple suits, you will probably be OK.
Multiple Suits: clarified policy, 14 Sep 2003
Rules on this are basically pretty simple. Multiple user names is NOT encouraged, it left the board too prone too abuse and left the moderators and myself with vast amounts of work to fix the problems caused by a few troublemaking users.
If people have multiple user names then they should not use them. If the temptation is too much for them, then they should PM me and I'll change the password so that they can't use them. People who register multiple user names (unless they've directly cleared it with me first) will be warned and if they continue to do so, all their user names will be blocked from using the board.
In an ideal world this would not be the case, and hopefully once I've thought of a good way of fixing the problem it will not be the case again. Unfortunately at the moment it is and I would ask all users to abide by this policy.
