Plugin de Categorías Siempre Anónimas

I had a request from a co-worker to find a way to offer “anonymous Q&A” to our division’s employees. At first blush, Discourse seemed like the wrong tool for the job: anonymous posting seemed anathema to the whole point of fostering open, friendly, but lively discussions. Discourse does have built-in support for anonymous posting, but it’s a global setting. What we needed was a way to restrict anonymous posting to a single category (or a select subset of them). Even better, make anonymous posting automatic, so that users don’t have to think about it (and can’t get it wrong).

Thus was born discourse-anonymous-categories.

This plugin lets you choose individual categories for “always-anonymous” behavior, where all posts and replies automatically use the anonymous pseudonym for the user instead of their actual identity. The user doesn’t have to opt-in, and more importantly, doesn’t need to remember to opt-out when they are done posting.

Here’s what that looks like:

  1. After the plugin is installed, turn on the global setting to enable “always-anonymous” categories:

  2. Then, pick a category (or create a new one) for which you want “always-anonymous” behavior, and turn on the “Force posts to be anonymous in this cateory” setting:

  3. Now, when anyone posts (note that current user is “E”):

  4. They will actually get anonymized:

  5. … like this (note that post is as “anonymous”/“A”):


This plays very nicely with recent versions of discourse-feature-voting, which can be used to anonymously vote on topics. (The votes themselves aren’t anonymous, but the identities of the voters are not currently surfaced through the UI, unlike “Likes”.)

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and whether non-registered users to post messages in this category?

Is this plugin still working (it hasn’t been updated since two years)?

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Somehow I’m having a hard time making it work on my local environment. I’m gonna do some digging and share back here.

Yes, it still works. I had to delete my tmp folder in order to make it work but I think this is a problem with my local dev installation only (not using docker).

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Sadly, the purpose for which this was created no longer exists, so I haven’t given the plugin any love for the last several years. If anyone wants to take over maintenance, I’d be happy to let them!

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I have a use for this plugin. How do I get it ‘looked after again’? Non-tech person asking, I’m on Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting). @michaeld @RGJ

Do you have a budget for this? If so, posting in marketplace is most likely the best approach :slight_smile:

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Are you sure that the plugin is not working correctly anymore?

When I read the posts above it just says it needs a new maintainer but Daniel says “Yes, it still works”

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Yes, I agree the post says it needs a new maintainer. I guess that’s what I’m wondering if someone would do. Is that something that comes with my Pro hosting package?

I am runing it on v2.0.0.beta10 +111 and looks like it is working.
I do not have some issues whit my instace

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FYI - versión de Docker 2.4: agregar el plugin genera un error 500 del servidor al publicar en una categoría marcada como anónima.

@JaredReisinger movió esto a #plugin:broken-plugin pendiente de tu investigación. Reescribí la forma en que manejamos las cuentas anónimas en la versión 2.4, así que quizás rompió el plugin.

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Como se mencionó anteriormente, @michaeld y yo estaríamos encantados de asumir el mantenimiento de este complemento.

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¿No tendrías una fecha estimada para la solución, verdad? :wink:

Probablemente en algún momento de septiembre…

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@sam tiene razón, el nuevo trabajo sobre los usuarios anónimos rompió el plugin. Estoy investigando esto ahora mismo porque lo necesito para uno de los productos de mi empresa.

El error que obtengo en el producto es:

NoMethodError (método `create_shadow' no definido para AnonymousShadowCreator:Class) /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-anonymous-categories/plugin.rb:76:in `block (2 levels) in activate!'

Proveniente de esta línea:

Intentaré solucionarlo y publicaré una actualización aquí pronto.

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Esta es mi solución rápida: Updating plugin to work with Discourse v2.4.0.beta2 · danielvlopes/discourse-anonymous-categories@08dda70 · GitHub

Creo que también podría eliminar las partes de custom_fields de los usuarios ahora que Discourse tiene un mejor soporte para usuarios anónimos, pero mantendré este cambio simple por ahora.

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@JaredReisinger ¿sigues manteniendo el plugin? Si no es así, quizás @Daniel_Lopes pueda cambiar a OP aquí para señalar la rama para que podamos sacar esto de #plugin:broken-plugin.

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Lo siento, sé que no soy un experto y no puedo hacerlo funcionar… ¿Podrías escribir unas pocas frases de instrucciones? Gracias.