The Standard staunchly defends the use of pseudonyms. Stated in site Policy:

This site doesn’t allow anonymous comments or posts. Everyone must have a pseudonym and we don’t allow people to change them whenever they feel like it.

The authors write for themselves with the following exceptions.

1. If we are putting up material from a guest poster, then it will go up under “Guest Post” and may or may not have a name or pseudonym attached.
2. If the site is reposting material from another site with no opinion or minimal opinion from an author, then it will go up under the name of “The Standard” (aka notices and features).
3. There are some routine posts like the daily OpenMike that will also go up under the name of “The Standard” (aka notices and features) because they also offer no opinion.

But ‘Notices and Features’ seems to be being used (misused) as a cover for someone posting obviously politically motivated attacks.

The last two posts today are both under this ‘pseudonym:

The cost of terrorist rhetoric

When John Key takes to the media to over-hype the risks of ISIS terrorism to NZ, there is a cost

And: Not a great headline for Key

Yesterday: Vance on terrorism scare tactics

An excellent piece by Andrea Vance in the weekend, on Key’s terrorism dog and pony show.

None of these sound like notices or features.Some re-posts, their daily ‘Open Mike’ and some general features and notices are posted under this author ID but it has also been used for some time for what appear to be personal opinions and politically motivated posts.

This has been happening for some time (months). It could be that someone is lax in switching their author login. Otherwise it looks like misuse of what presumably is supposed to be a generic ‘author’ name.

Site sysop ‘lprent’ claims to be a long time online forum expert. The Standard can do what it likes but this doesn’t look like responsible use of author identities.