It's just the way that a lot of internet forums are, they've evolved a bit like CB radio where everyone had 'handles' - it's no big deal, Fred Smith could register as Fred Smith and his avatar could be a photo of himself, but it's a tiny photo and you'd not recognise him if you bumped in to him the day after his first post, or his 100th. I only recognised you (Keith) at WCAF because John Raines told me you were there so I went looking closely at registration badges of pasty faced people
Fred Smith may as well have called himself Norewgian Blue and had a photo of a parrot as his avatar.
If he sticks around and you get to 'know' him; one day you may actually meet him and by then will probably know his real name anyway, from a website, from his signature, his profile, from PMs, whatever.
I served in a Welsh Infantry regiment; there were so many with the same surname - Jones, Williams, Price, Edwards, Hughes, Thomas, Reece, Morgan etc, that they were known by their last two numbers. I can still pretty much go from 00-99 and put a face to each two numbers; there were so many Joneses that 3 of them had the same last two numbers and had to be known by their last 3 .... it was mostly no use knowing their first names as most would be 'Dai'!! There were many different surnames that had the last 2 numbers, so there would be a Jones 56, a Davies 56, a Morgan 56, etc etc.
I never knew the names, first or second, of some guys that I knew by numbers. One guy that was known as 'legs' - I thought was nicknamed such because he was a tall lanky git, but that was just coincidence, he was Jones 11, and it took me about 15 years to find that out!
