Anonymous Plugin

[Bolarinwa_Balogun]

Hi,
I’m setting up discourse to be used as a discussion board for a school. One of the requested features was students can make a post where they appear as anonymous to other students but teacher is aware of the individual that made the post.
I was wondering if there was any plugin to this effect or any suggestions on how to achieve this.

Thanks

[HAWK]

Hi there,
You don’t need a plugin – anonymous posting is part of core. You can try it out yourself here. Click the spy icon from the avatar dropdown menu. In your own community you need to ensure that you have anonymous posting enabled in your site settings.

[david (David Taylor)]

@HAWK

You can try it out yourself here

Normal users can’t see that button on Meta

@HAWK

you have to be Trust Level 4 to utilise that feature here

I don’t think this bit is possible as part of core?:

@Bolarinwa_Balogun

but teacher is aware of the individual that made the post

[HAWK]

@david

Normal users can’t see that button on Meta

Damn it. I always forget that. You’re right.

@david

I don’t think this bit is possible as part of core?:

It is if the teacher is an admin. You can do an IP compare (which almost always works…). Come to think of it, that might be an issue in educational institutions if the users are grouped on a common IP.

[Bolarinwa_Balogun]

Yes, grouping under a common IP would be an issue. Do you have any other suggestions on how admin could be made aware of the individual who make an anonymous post?

Thanks

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Impersonate and switch should work

[Bolarinwa_Balogun]

Please, could you elaborate on this?

[dax (Daniela)]

As an admin you can impersonate the anonymous user:

Now you are the anonymous user:

and if you click on that icon you will return to be the original user (not anonymous) who wrote the message.

[david (David Taylor)]

It looks like there’s a data explorer query for this as well:

Is anonymous posting possible?

You’re right – this query of yours will do that: SELECT users.username , user_custom_fields.value FROM users JOIN user_custom_fields ON users.id = user_custom_fields.user_id OR users.id = CAST( user_custom_fields.value AS int ) WHERE user_custom_fields.name LIKE 'shadow_id' ORDER BY user_custom_fields.value There is no obvious way through the UI though.

[Bolarinwa_Balogun]

Thank you for your explanation

[Bolarinwa_Balogun]

Quick question
Is it possible for two people to share a single anonymous account? The reason I’m asking is if it’s possible, then the impersonate and switch might not be too effective.

Thanks

[dax (Daniela)]

No, because every anonymous user have a different (autogenerated) email like this for example 1b2c3d4e5f6g@anon.your-site.com

[MakaryGo (Makary Gołosz)]

Ciao, Dax!
First of all, congratulations on joining the Team ! As you seem to know functioning of anonymous mode pretty well, perhaps you’ll be able to tell me - is it possible to alter i.e. via plugin this very behaviour? That is, having only one @anonymous user serving as anonypuppet for all users?

[dax (Daniela)]

Thanks @MakaryGo!

If I understand your request you would like to create a unique user, for example Anon1, and make sure that all anonymous users on your forum write as Anon1 .

From an administrative point of view I do not think it’s a good idea. How could an administrator or moderator trace the identity of a user in case of problems?
How can users themselves understand who wrote what and respond accordingly?

BTW through the plugins you can do pretty much everything, including overriding the logic that uses Discourse in creating anonymous users. You should open a new topic on dev and explain exactly what you would like to do and especially why, to get more information from the experts.

[aksoforever (Qiang)]

I tried it, but no results.

The following link is also,
anyone who knows the my problem? thanks in advance

Finding originating account of anonymous posts

There’s a good reason why that feature is disabled by default. You should have a really good reason to enable it and you should trust them to not abuse that feature. Maybe use a higher anonymous_posting_min_trust_level? You can use the following query in the Data Explorer if you really need to find out who’s who. But, if you need to use it on a regular basis you should really ask yourself if your community members are ready for the anonymous posting feature. Choose the right query depending on…

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

I added a query that works with Discourse v2.3 and newer in Finding originating account of anonymous posts.

[justin.noom (Justin Thurer)]

@dax

Now you are the anonymous user:

Is the button in the screenshot below said text still usable? That would be so useful when impersonating other users if I was able to immediately switch back.

[aksoforever (Qiang)]

thanks very much, it works.

[dax (Daniela)]

@justin.noom

That would be so useful when impersonating other users if I was able to immediately switch back.

This is specific to anonymous mode. Clicking that button brings you to the original author of the post/topic but you won’t return to your admin account.

Currently, to avoid logging out of the user being impersonated (anonymous or not) and then logging in to your admin account, the simplest method is to impersonate the user in an anonymous browser window.

That said, anonymous mode is disabled by default on all our hosted sites. To enable it, you need to request it by sending an email (or a PM) to us.

[justin.noom (Justin Thurer)]

Thanks so much for the clarification! I’ll be sure to do that.