The term “Anonymous Coward” is commonly used on forums, weblogs, and wikis to refer to a content submitter who chooses not to identify themself, to any degree – that is, a user editing a wiki or posting on a forum or blog without an account may fill a required name field with “Anonymous Coward”; some blogs do this automatically when the name field is left blank.
In reality, this often provides little more ‘privacy’ than saving under an account would – many wikis like Wikipedia? store the IP Address?es of anonymous user’s in the page history.
Another downside of being anonymous online is the fact that the term Anon. Coward (as it is often abbreviated) can be used by a number of posters, thus replying to a specific anonymous post is difficult to say the least.