Ha ha, wait a second, not so fast.  Now that we've invested the ten seconds or so of our lives reading your first post the least we should be able to do is follow up, right?  ;DMy wonder is why you'd want to cite anything from a public forum anyway.  I think such a move would largely be looked down upon in the academic world.  I realize that Skydiver may very well be correct in intelligent about what he says, but this goes to the issue of how a person can trust what is written on a rather anonymous site where posters themselves don't really use citations to back up their claims.  There may be a few times I could conceive of someone citing a public forum in a paper, but not many of these examples would exist, IMO.I think you best course of action here is to try to find out where Skydiver got his information from and try to follow it to its source. 

Yes, I understand.  I didn't realize that you were speaking of information from the first person.  As an original source then it can work, I think.  Of course it would probably work better if he sent the information to you in an E-mail and gave his real name…so using “SKYDIVER386” as the name of a source might not look quite as good.  😀

Well if you want I can tell you about our Iraqi flanking maneuver from Gulf War I since I was Supreme Commander of all coalition forces back then….  ;DNo, actually my point is that anyone can claim they are anyone in an online forum, so it's important to be very careful when making these citations.  I don't think that a screen name alias give any creedence to that person, which is why if I were you I'd try to use his real name.  And his rank.  If someone wants to independently verify it they can do so by looking up his legal name.  They can't do it practically speaking with having only his screen name.  Has your professor mentioned anything about this to you?  Depending on how many points your assignment is worth, you may want to check with him/her.

I see.  Is this the way it says to do it in your “web reading assignment”?The part about checking the source's name....this is why I thought an e-mail would be more credible.  I don't think that it's absolutely necessary that someone has immediate access to your source material.  For example, if you were to do a one-on-one interview of a person while for a dissertation you are writing your source material would obviously not be immediately accessible.  However, on demand you might have to produce recordings of the conversation.  Likewise if you had an e-mail you could later on show it as proof of your source.Alright, I don't want to get in your way in terms of how you accomplish things.  I realize that different professors have different standards and levels of what they accept.

You can cite it as an anecdote from an eyewitness/expert witness account.  It doesn't require formal MLA citation, but after you use the reference from Skydiver (whom should remain anonymous and therefore call his username a “pseudonymn”), you go and find formal sources that corroborate his testimony….in this case probably military journals.  What you are doing is not out of bounds, but you do not need to cite the message board you got it from.  If it were from a blog, however, you would need to cite that, and I believe there is a citation method for blogs.

Well, that seems really odd to me.  I may find more about it in the coming months as I do more research.  But if I were a professor on the receiving end of one of these papers with a citation from a “kyfatboy” or a “Monkey Pants” or any number of names that I'd rather not print in this post, I'd have to ask myself if the writer was serious.  Actually I think I would be more receptive to it than some 50+ or 60+ professor who is not all that geeky. 

Treat it as if it were a periodical or academic journal.  Author/Editor, publisher, date, location, vol number etc…