Not that anyone cares, but this discussion of how much people's online personalities match their true selves is an interesting one and has some fun implications for the social psychologist in me and all of us.
I hear often that the way in which people post is not representative of their true persona, but research on online communication would disagree. People may go to extremes and amplify behaviors that, without the guise of anonymity, might be more subtle in person. But given enough time and interaction, glimpses or in some cases wall-sized murals tend to emerge. For example, consider that when we meet people on the board it is often the first time we are seeing them and having an actual lived exchange. Not much gets shown in those situations, and personalities are tempered in favor of playing nice as is required in such social situations. But how many people from the board have you met and then subsequently seen more frequently, had more contact with? Or friends of yours that you know well--beyond chance social meetings--that post on the boards? I have yet to experience a person who fits these criteria as being vastly different on an internet forum from the way that I experience them in 'real' life. And their posts tend to illuminate the 'real life' version of them in ways that fit my experience of them. As I'm sure my current post is doing for those of you that know me.
It's a subject I was interested in enough a couple years ago to do some reviewing of the literature and find some moderately interesting things. I ended up writing a paper for a class in fact, a research proposal using message board participants as subjects.
Anyway, I'll stop now. Food for thought, or is it thought for food.