Anonymous posting -- but retaining original user permissions

[Jonathan5]

P.S. It looks like this is the same unresolved problem as mentioned in this more recent post (emphasis added):

@Geoffrey_Challen

The second more serious problem is that anonymous users seem to lose access granted to the named user. We use groups and category permissions heavily to control what students can see on the forum, which is particularly important when maintaining the same forum across multiple semesters. (Essentially each new batch of students is put into a semester-specific group which provides a simplified view of the forum where they can only see semester-specific categories and a few others that we allow continuous posting in.) So once a user enters anonymous mode, they lose access to the very topics that they would like to engage in anonymously.

The second problem seems harder to fix. Ideally Discourse would forward some permissions and group memberships to the anonymous user—although probably not all, since you probably want to avoid moderators accidentally taking certain actions while anonymous. But if there was an option to allow non-admin permissions and group membership to be forwarded to anonymous users, that would support our use case.