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[OhWhatProvidence]

Formatting for a evaluative paper on ARGs?

[si1verdrake]

I don't know anything about evaluative papers, if that's a specific format, but I have written some scientific papers that occasionally run into similar issues. My suggestion would be to put a paragraph in the beginning of the paper addressing your terminology, and stick to that convention for the rest of the paper.

As an example, for a paper I wrote about a robot I worked on, early in the paper I had a sentence along the lines of: "The configuration I just described will be referred to as 'Top Mode' for the remainder of this paper."

So in your case, put in a basic description of the donotcontinue account, and then say something like "to simplify terminology, the operator of the donotcontinue account will be referred to as DNC throughout the rest of this paper." And so on for other specific acronyms/nicknames.

Usernames should be fine, again maybe prefaced with "all participants are referred to by their forum usernames" to avoid confusion. I don't think italics are necessary, unless some of the usernames are words that might get confusing when used in a sentence.

Of course, your writing center/program might have specific requirements, so those should take precedence over random forum user's advice.

Good luck with the paper!