the pseudo-pseudonymity of Coffeeandink

The quick take:

From 2006 to 2009, Micole Sudberg used her full legal name in public posts on her coffeeandink LiveJournal so people could easily find her online or at conventions. On March 2, 2009, she announced that she was pseudonymous and anyone who tried to include her name in the history of Racefail 09 was "outing" her. A full week later, on March 9, she began hiding her history, altering some public posts and making others "friends only."

Tempest Bradford says screencaps are important to preserve the historical record, so here are two examples of Micole's casual public use of her name that were saved by the Internet Archive (click for larger images):

Jace said, "The issue isn’t whether or not she wanted to establish a pseudonymous identity online, it’s that she went about doing it so badly she has no right to complain when it failed."

If metaphors should not be used lightly, saying anyone "outed" Micole is an insult to every gay person who has been outed.

The longer take:

For years, Micole used her "very identifiable first name" as her LJ profile name. This post (now "friends only") may be the first time she used her last name on her LJ. The last time, also "friends only" now, was undoubtedly on March 1, 2009, the day before she announced her pseudonymity. When that post was public, it told which conventions she would be at, should anyone who can google wish to find her.

On March 2, 2009, she announced that she had been outed, told her readers she was pseudonymous, and said it's fine to call her Mely or Micole.

Five days later, she wrote, "I may change my userprofile name to "Mely" again" and mentioned her "very identifiable first name":

Please also explain how I was hiding my identity from you ... with a user profile that lists my very identifiable first name, in a post that is signed with my very identifiable first name.

On March 9, a week after claiming she had been outed, she wrote, "I have locked down or edited some posts with identifying information in them."

The question her allies don't ask: If she believed she was pseudonymous, why did she hide posts and change her user name?

She's quite right when she says her first name is "very identifiable". PokeMyName says:

We couldn't find name MICOLE in our database which has 74,738 names that are compiled from 702,203 Americans. Have you spelled it correctly? If you spelled it correctly but we couldn't find this means that there were not even one person with name MICOLE in our database. But if this is your name, we still poke it and give you a report below so keep reading.

First some popularity statistics: Regarding there were not even a single person with this name, popularity of MICOLE should be less than per million. According to this calculation, we can estimate that as of December.21.2010 14:37 there are less than 443 people named as MICOLE in the United States and the number of MICOLE's should not be increasing more than 4 people per year.

The exhaustive version:

For the first International Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Day, she shared on her LJ a story published under her legal name.

From 2007 to 2009, K. Tempest Bradford hot-linked Micole's legal name to her Coffeeandink LJ on two pages at Fantasy Magazine. Sierrawyndsong observes:

The article titled Fantasy Roundtable: People of Color in Fantasy Literature, written by K. Tempest Bradford and published by Dark Fantasy, links an author's name to their LJ account. (It is my opinion that if the article published the identity and link without the author's permission, then Dark Fantasy and Bradford owe the author an apology and a retraction.) This same article has been used very often in numerous blogs concerning race issues in SciFi genre and has always contained the link. So, not just there, but in many, many posts, this article has made it very public who that author is in real life. Therefore, it is a MATTER OF PUBLIC RECORD.

At Aqueduct Press, where Micole's full legal name appears in several posts, her "very identifiable first name" is in the sidebar under Contributors, linked to a profile page that has a "My Web Page" link to her LJ.

All of which is why, at the start of the RaceFail flamewar, anyone who googled any part of her identity saw the rest among the first five choices. (To understand Google ranking, see this.)

In 2009, when I responded to “Will Shetterly – do not engage”, I couldn’t remember how to spell Sudberg, so I googled "Micole coffeeandink". Her last name was the third or fourth choice. When she then claimed she was pseudonymous, I thought that was hilarious given how "out" she had been for years, but I removed her last name from my blogs.

But that did not satisfy her. On March 2, she blogged about people posting her last name without mentioning we had acted in ignorance, and her readers began attacking people for "outing" her.

That pissed me off so much I posted her name. My reasoning: if anyone should be recorded in the history of Racefail 09, everyone should be. When friends convinced me I'd over-reacted, I scrubbed her name from my blog. A week or more after accusing people of "outing" her,  Micole changed her LJ user profile to "Mely" and removed her last name from the public pages of her LJ.

ETA: When Micole began hiding her history, she said:

At this point, I am mostly just fighting a losing battle to prevent my mother from finding my LJ via Google.

Clue for anyone who hasn't figured this out: If you don't want your mama to find you by Googling, don't put your legal name in public posts on your LJ.

ETA 2: After a couple of years, I realized Micole and her friends were only playing outrage theater—if she truly wished to be pseudonymous, they wouldn't be calling attention to her pseudonymity. So I restored her name to my histories of Racefail 09 and invited her to restore her own posts.

See also:
the racefail 09 flamewar
my response to "Will Shetterly: Do Not Engage".