Of course... if you want to talk to him. Identifying him in that case doesn't require much at all. As I said, if someone wished to provide services for PerlMonks.

Let me give you an example. Say I write a brain-bench type quiz. Or, more interestingly, a timed quiz which requires people to write one-line solutions to problems, and evals the answers for correctness. Of course, you'd want to keep track of scores. Or an auxilliary web site... another person could write what amounted to an extension of the Monastery, and automatically maintain the identities of the Monks. Or a chat channel, or (very likely) any number of things I haven't thought of, but which some clever Monk will. Anything where people want to be able to "be themselves", and maintain their established identities.

In these cases, it is not reasonable to authenticate identity personally, and no mechanism yet exists for doing it automatically. Monks have thus far shown great creativity utilizing the rudiments which the site has provided (the XML tickers, in particular) to extend the functionality of the site. It would be interesting to see what people would come up with, given more such tools. As it happens, by the way, neither of my suggestions is rooted in speculation; I've actually worked on things which would require (or at least be greatly facilitated by) such functionality.

Besides the fact that such things could help alleviate the burden on vroom to add all kinds of features and services by himself.