Always-Anonymous Categories Plugin

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 - docker version 2.4 - adding the plug in generates 500 server error when posting to category flagged as anonymous.

@JaredReisinger moved this to #plugin:broken-plugin pending your investigation. I redid the way we do anon accounts in 2.4 so maybe it broke the plugin.

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As discussed above, I and @michaeld would be happy to take over the maintenance for this plugin.

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You wouldn’t have ETA for a fix, would you? :wink:

Probably somewhere in September…

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@sam is right, the new work on the anom users broke the plugin. I’m looking into to this now because I need for one of my company’s products.

The error I get in product is:

NoMethodError (undefined method `create_shadow' for AnonymousShadowCreator:Class) /var/www/discourse/plugins/discourse-anonymous-categories/plugin.rb:76:in `block (2 levels) in activate!'

Coming from this line:
https://github.com/JaredReisinger/discourse-anonymous-categories/blob/master/plugin.rb#L76

Will try to fix it and post an update here soon.

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This is my quick fix: https://github.com/danielvlopes/discourse-anonymous-categories/commit/08dda707fb01fcdeaf78782997f019f5548b590b

I think I could remove the user custom_fields parts too now that Discourse has better support for anonymous users, but I will keep this change simple for now.

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@JaredReisinger are you still maintaining the plugin? If not perhaps @Daniel_Lopes can change to OP here to point to the branch so we can ship this out of #plugin:broken-plugin

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I’m sorry, I know I am not a guru, I cannot make it work… Could you pls write few sentences of instructions? Thank you.