How anonymous is the anonymous mode?

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A discussion about the anonymity of Discourse’s anonymous mode is underway. elopio inquires about the strength of this anonymity, wondering if admins can identify users. ClawdiaWolf shares that admins can deanonymize users through IP matching or database mapping records. However, RGJ points out that any admin can look up the user’s identity via a data explorer query.

ClawdiaWolf reveals that she uses a query to dump the 20 most recent anonymous mode accounts and their associated users, but RGJ advises minimizing privacy violations. ClawdiaWolf explains that their community uses anonymous mode for short story contests, where the posters are revealed after voting closes, and the query is only used by a script to change the post owners to the real users. RGJ finds this to be a cool use case for the anonymous posting function.

1

In the anonymous mode, it is not clear how strong is this anonymity.

Are the discourse admins able to identify the user? Are the server admins able to identify the user? Or is this untraceable?

2

There’s really only two ways that I know of to deanonymize an anonymous mode account, one is IP matching the accounts and the other would be checking the mapping records in the database that maps the anonymous accounts to the real user.

3

The IP address method is not reliable.

Yes, any admin can look it up.

4

Sorry, a bad habit slipped in there when I replied. On a rather large instance I’m a moderator on I get yelled at for posting responses that are too detailed, so I tend to answer the question without going into too much detail. I forgot that here it’s actually okay to get into the details. :slight_smile:

Thank you for posting that link, I knew I’d seen an DE query on here that could look it up with a topic and post id before but couldn’t find it when searching. :slight_smile:

I don’t usually need to do that kind of lookup so I usually use a query that just dumps the 20 most recent anonymous mode accounts and their associated users. :slight_smile:

5

You might want to minimize the amount of privacy that you violate :wink:

6

We don’t use anonymous mode for general posting. We use it to run short story contests where the stories are posted anonymously and after voting closes the posters are revealed. The DE query we use is only used by the script that runs at the end of the contest to change the post owners to the real users. :slight_smile:

7

That’s a pretty cool use case for the anonymous posting function!