Anonymous Claire

Anonymous Claire, also known as AnonC, is an online fannish community created in 2002. It has had two iterations, first on Live Journal and since 2020 as a Discord server. Claire Brialey is the eponymous 'Claire'.

The original Live Journal community was created in May 2002. It took its name from the LJ requirement that Claire's comments to other users' journals were posted as an 'anonymous' user, as at the time she had no journal of her own. Ironically, she created a journal jointly with Mark Plummer two days before the community was formed and thus was no longer anonymous.

The community's stated purpose was:

Anonymous Claire is a community of Fannish LiveJournallers. It has recently been opened up for any LJ user to join although to prevent spam and the likes any new user will be moderated initially.

The intention is that this community is used as a point of contact for free discussion between fans. Do you want to discuss a convention? Whinge about fan funds? Arrange a night out? Moan about public transport? Pretty much anything goes.

Although the moderators were UK-based the community was open to fans in all countries and there were many members in the United States and Australia. There were over a hundred members in total although it's now difficult to tell as many journals have been deleted. While the community technically still exists it has been dormant since 2013 and in practice had been largely abandoned by 2010.

On 16 November 2020 in the aftermath of the Punctuation convention the name was resurrected for a Discord server. John Coxon wrote on its rules-of-the-road:

AnonC was a UK-based fannish LiveJournal community in the old days. This is a sort of reboot of the community as a Discord server for those who want to come and chat.

The server is open to:

[People] who are in UK fandom, or who attend UK conventions, or who wouldn't feel out of place at an Eastercon.