I'm the site author and creator of TownSquare. The only moment it got a bit abused it was during the first HN spike. But before and after that, everything was friendly.

Love this idea and your creation of it. Unfortunately do think the parent's concerns are valid - at this moment on your site at least one person has set their name to something offensive so it shows up perpetually (under the street light). Anonymity+connectivity persists in bringing out the worst of our impulses, I guess...

Do you think names are really necessary? Or could they take some other form than text, perhaps unicode chars chosen from a selection of abstract shapes? The wonderful https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.

I think there might be some merit to a basic filter, perhaps some sort of timeout for obvious slurs. I see a few right now.