why are names 'greyed out'

I often note that names of Original posters are greyed out from time to time, I am curious about it?

Probably because the name doesn't meet current name policy standards.

A related thread: hatfields vs mccoys

At one point, in the early days of permies, people didn't need last names. Then, to improve the community feel, last names were added into the system. Everyone was supposed to pick a last name....not everyone did. So, the system automatically assigned them the last name of either Hatfield or McCoy. I think, eventually, a lot of those odd names got greyed out. It doesn't make sense to have thousands of Hatfields and McCoys running around! But, the posts didn't need to be deleted, because they are good posts. Since, we want to encourage real names, the non-real names get blanked out. Even to this day, we blank out some not-real-sounding-names until they get changed.

On the topic of Hatfield and McCoy, you can see both in the very first thread on permies! I'm pretty sure both these accounts had only a first name, and the last names were automatically assigned...but I'm honestly not sure: https://permies.com/t/3/set. There's both a Hatfield and a McCoy.

Somebody signed up for permies and when asked to select a "real sounding name" they went with "GOAT FUCKER 7".  We thought we would ask them to change their name to something a bit more real sounding.  And while we wait for that change, we decided to grey out their current name.