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)]

我试过了，但没有结果。

下面的链接也是：
有人知道我的问题出在哪里吗？提前感谢。

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)]

我添加了一个适用于 Discourse v2.3 及更高版本的查询，详见：Finding originating account of anonymous posts - #8 by gerhard

[justin.noom (Justin Thurer)]

@dax

现在您是匿名用户：

截图中显示的按钮是否仍然可用？如果我能立即切换回来，那在冒充其他用户时将非常有用。

[aksoforever (Qiang)]

非常感谢，它有效。

[dax (Daniela)]

@justin.noom

如果我能立即切换回来，那么在冒充其他用户时那将非常有用。

这专门针对匿名模式。点击该按钮会带你回到帖子/主题的原作者，但你无法返回到你的管理员账户。

目前，为了避免在冒充用户（匿名或非匿名）后登出，然后再登录到你的管理员账户，最简单的方法是在匿名浏览器窗口中冒充该用户。

不过，匿名模式在我们所有托管的站点上默认是禁用的。要启用它，你需要通过发送邮件（或私信）向我们提出申请。

[justin.noom (Justin Thurer)]

非常感谢您的澄清！我一定会照做。