purplecat

I don't have any strong reasons to keep information well separated, though I like to avoid forcing fandom upon work colleagues, or fanfiction upon more general fannish friends but I generally leave a bread crumb trail so people can find me if they want to link me up.

I've had a couple of nasty moments, once when a student wrote an abusive email about my daughter (and that caused me to place most information about her and my family behind various sorts of password protection - it's not super secure but someone has to be doing more than a bit of random stalking late at night while drunk to find out much about her) and once the aforementioned trolling, which mostly demonstrated that your average troll isn't prepared to look far and really does just lose interest if you refuse to respond to their trolling. I have gradually worked out boundaries for what sorts of information I'm prepared to put where, and I'm more careful than some about sharing passwords between services, but most of what I do comes down to common sense and an assessment of what the likely risks are.

Not sure about the published author thing. I get the impression that with any degree of celebrity comes the need to manage your web presence very carefully because fan backlash is never pretty and inevitable to a certain extent, so you need ways to separate out fan contact from friend contact so you always have a place to run and hide and be yourself. So that's a very particular case when you need identities to be difficult to link.

Someone actively and determinedly malicious could cause a lot of trouble, but they can almost whatever you do. I feel I'm fairly secure against drive-by troublemakers though.