How to hide just names and usernames for anonymous users

Support
1

We have a new forum from migrated content (with several years of conversations) and are struggling with how to balance public visibility with privacy.

Can we hide all user names / usernames unless people are logged in? In other words, all messages content is visible and indexed on the web, but but to see any names or usernames, a person must be a logged in member?

Our logins come from an SSO which requires real, full names. Usernames were auto-generated using their real names during the initial migration of our old content. So turning off “full name” doesn’t address the central privacy issue of exposing everyone’s names to the internet.

I have seen a few examples online of forums where user profiles are not visible unless a person is logged in, but I don’t think I’ve seen examples like what I described above. And at any rate, I haven’t seen the admin setting that would allow even this. Update: I found this particular setting, but it doesn’t affect the primary aim of hiding usernames and names.

2

It might be possible to have a plugin that would change the username in the user and topic and post models for anonymous users. It would be tricky to do it without breaking stuff. Also, quotes that mentioned users would either include their names or also need to be modified. If it’s worth $2000 to $5000 to you post in Marketplace.

You could hide stuff with css but it would still be there and that wouldn’t keep crawlers from seeing the names.

Given that your sso forces you to use names you consider private you’ve got a hard-to-solve problem.

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3

Thanks for the info. I was afraid that would be the case! Yes it’s a bit unfortunate how the SSO integration went for us, but this is the situation we’re in now for better or worse.