FWIW, you don't have to create an account to answer questions on Stack Overflow. We'll encourage you to do so, because it generally makes things easier... But if you want to just enter an email address (can be fake) and some sort of name (doesn't have to be one you use anywhere else), you can post without registering or revealing any personal details. We don't require folks to associate an account on another site, or silly "real name" requirements, or anything else that'd force you to identify yourself.

But, I'd guess what you're probably after is something else entirely: a way to have an account, and post answers using that account, but not have those answers associated publicly with that account. This has been requested a few times over the years, but... It's a bit of a troublesome idea:

- Spam / trolling (the kind performed by humans, not bots) often depends on being able to stay just a little bit ahead of the folks who are trying to stop you. Anything that can buy you a few more minutes of activity before being blocked can upset that balance; sure, we could remove anonymity for moderators, but there's a psychological impact here: if you think you can get away with something, you're more likely to try.

- Reputation is tracked on a per-account basis, and most of the accounting there is public: again, this serves multiple purposes, both for the author themselves (they're encouraged to become "invested" in the site by contributing in exchange for privileges) and for the greater community (privileges aren't handed out capriciously, they're earned in ways that can be tracked).

- What about things like edits and comments? Presumably you'd want to be able to respond to comments on your answers, or make edits that correct problems - for "unregistered" answers, that's solved by giving you a temporary account that retains edit rights, comment rights, etc. (at least until you lose the cookie); if you posted anonymously under a normal account, would your edits and comments also be anonymous, or would you show up incongruously as yourself?

- We periodically publish a full set of data on posts, comments, edits, etc. that anyone can use; we'd have to decide whether or not to preserve anonymity in this data, and not just for authorship but also for edits, commentary, etc.

It's a big can of worms, which is why we've so far avoided opening it... But I do see the advantages as well.

Related:

- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/198/should-there-be-...

- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/177154/posting-anony...

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