The discussion revolves around anonymous posting capabilities in Discourse, specifically whether staff can identify the real authors of anonymous posts. Un3qual mentions using Discourse for school purposes where students provide anonymous feedback to teachers, while principals need to trace inappropriate posts. Falco argues for true anonymity, suggesting a warning is necessary if anonymity is compromised. sam suggests using Data Explorer queries to identify anonymous posters, and JammyDodger provides a sample SQL query for this purpose. satonotdead emphasizes the importance of genuine anonymity and advocates for Discourse options that ensure private and anonymous usage without logging IP addresses.
Continuing the discussion from Anonymous posting mode:
I am using discourse for a school, and students like to give teachers anonymous feedback without being scared that teachers will know who it is, and dislike them, however the principal needs to be able to see someone if they make an inappropriate post.
Hmm, I thought that a link to the main account should be exposed under “Show Email” but it isn’t.
Does not compute.
I think that anonymous shoud at least try to be anonymous, if not you should out a big red warning saying otherwise.
In my case the information would never go to the teachers, just to the appropriate administrators.
I believe you, and I know its easy to find the real anonymous throug nginx logs, but if the Discourse itself make it easy the student needs to be warned. And the warning alone will make you loose a lot of valuable feedback, making all the feature useless.
Yeah I see your point. I guess if it’s a real issue, I could just look at IPs.
You can run a query with data explorer to see it if you need to.
Hi all! I’m wondering if the access for admin to be able to identify anonymous posters has been changed nowadays?
I think a data explorer query is still the recommended way.
Something simple like this perhaps:
-- [params]
-- user_id :user
SELECT user_id,
master_user_id
FROM anonymous_users
WHERE user_id = :user
Though the exact query may depend on what you need the info for.
Anonymous means anonymous; the feature mentioned it’s pseudo-anonymous (not truly anonymous in practice, as described).
I wish the opposite as asked on this topic, Discourse could offer an option to be used anonymously.
An starting point should be to not record IPs and a simple anonymous user behavior.
I like to start using the correct word and meaning of everything, including ‘anonymous’ or ‘private’.