Anonnymous forum

[Luca]

I read about the anonymous posting feature but I do not know how to enable the complete anonymous option described by @BCHK:

How will anonymous posting mode work?

OK - so the use case that you guys are thinking when you are thinking about this is, I suspect, the forum that uses real names and then the person periodically wants to use an anonymous post - is that correct? Of course - on my forum I use the complete anonymous option that you already have in the forums - so all my users are already anonymous - and an additional layer of anonymity is redundant. I guess I can see this need/requirement - but it seems much lower (at least in my priority list) fo…

I think discourse currently supports only anonymous posting, i.e. users can decide to post or not as anonymous.
This forced you to anonymize join dates, cycle anon accounts and disable likes and other post actions.

I have a different scenario since I would like to force anonymous posting from the beginning: the behavior of discourse should not change:

• original join dates
• no anon account cycling (but is the AnonymousShadowCreator generated username unique?)
• all actions enabled

Only admins can see real names: users only see shadow names of other users.

1. Join dates are not so important
2. If you allow anonymous_account_duration_minutes to be set to 0 and change anonymous_shadow_creator.rb accordingly you can disable anon account cycling:
   SiteSetting.anonymous_account_duration_minutes > 0 && shadow.last_posted_at < SiteSetting.anonymous_account_duration_minutes.minutes.ago
3. The problem is how to disable/not render the list of users who liked a post or display the anon name instead of the real one

Maybe I can use the Always-anonymous categories plugin or I can extend it to rewrite the like username/profile link.

In the end my need is simply replacing username everywhere, by using a discuss provided one that is unique.
It would be nice if I could use two different usernames for a topic creator e.g. topicCreator123 when is commenting on their topic and anonymous456 in all other cases.