What reason is there to "keep things seperate?"and everything to do with wanting to keep things separate,
I mean, really. If you are an honest player, nothing you say on the forums is going to hurt you in game or vice versa. In fact, more often than not it's helpful, more than once over the years I've had people ask me questions or thank me for something I posted on the forums because they only read the forums and don't post.
There is no good reason to mask your in-game identity on the forums. I mean, it's already a persona, it's not like we're asking you to use your real life name. The only reason to do what you're doing is to prevent people from calling you out for doing something wrong in game.
The difference is something like facebook is attributable to my real life. It's totally different here, where you're using a persona of a persona. I keep it seperate because it's not connected in any way to what's going on here. But if I had a reason to direct someone there, I would share it because it's relevant in that situation. Again, I don't have anything to hide. If I have an actual reason to send people to my social media, I will. But I'm not just going to say "here's my facebook" without any context lol.Post your facebook page, post your twitter account, post your steam account. You have nothing to hide right, so why not?
Obviously you should not do these things and should keep them all separate.
The forums are connected to the game by SE. You have to be a player of the game to post Thus, there is no reason to seperate the forums from the game. Again unless you do bad things in game and have something to hide, there is no reason not to use your real character. There is nobody here that doesn't have a character in the game. This forum is an extension of the game itself, it just provides a place to discuss stuff without having to spend 5 minutes firing the game itself up when you're not in the mood to actually play.
I've used it the entire time these forums have existed and it hasn't harmed me in any way. I am generally suspicious of anyone who does not use their main character here, I consider anyone who does this to be potentially an unscrupulous player who might do wrong things in game and doesn't want anyone to call them out for it (Which is against the rules anyway, so in practice it shouldn't actually happen)
I will take the word of a player on these forums who isn't hiding who they are in game over one who is.