How will anonymous posting mode work?

feature
21

Great question there, maybe tomorrow, pre-staging avatars is tricky.

22

Sam, YOU ARE THE BEST, I love you. :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart:

23

Letā€™s not go overboard here, its just a tiny feature most sites will not use.

24

Thanks for fixing that issue where I was not able to exit from anonymous mode and had to log out.

That was SO FAST :racehorse:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/be27fca90435427f0889c1610af2a0c44db5d8ab

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25

No problems, by the way, you need trust level 4 on meta to post anonymously, we donā€™t want anyone really using this outside of testing.

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26

@sam youā€™re THE BEST OF THE CREAM! :heart_eyes:

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27

Good; for a moment, I was concerned this would be too open to abuse :smile:

Also, do you, @anonymous1, and @anonymous2 need a room? :laughing:

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28

I think secret agent guys are starting to be overused for anonymity. Would a question mark letter avatar (?) do the trick? At least itā€™s simple and more consistent.

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29

This post is made by @eviltrout ā€“ or is it?

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30

No, I am Spartacus!

31

@sam join dates seem to be that of the ā€œparentā€ account?

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32

Yes, this makes it very easy to tell who is the anonymous user.

@anonymous1 is @sam

@anonymous2 is @zogstrip

@anonymous3 is @eviltrout (as they said :stuck_out_tongue: )

So on.

Edit: Totally puts a new light on the @anonymous1 and @sam discussion above :stuck_out_tongue:

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33

Oops will change it to 2 days ago, cause I need to bypass some new account restrictions

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34

Maybe it should assign randomized name IDs, instead of sequential?

35

this does raise a severe design flaw here, if your anon shadow is ā€œburnedā€ its ā€œburnedā€ forever. I wonder if we should amend so all anon posts come from a single account as @eviltrout first suggested?

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36

Iā€™d suggest against making all f the posts come from a single account.

Itā€™d make it difficult to track a conversation. Is it 2 people talking, is it 3?
Is a user pretending to be a different anonymous user to derail the conversation?

I mean sure a person who has had their anon account burned is a shame, but this alternative just makes the feature unusable for me. Iā€™d rather there be a way to generate a new anon account (with a delay to prevent abuse) and totally cut loose the old one.

1 Like
37

I dunno, this system has worked for both Slashdot and 4chan forever. People can already create throwaway accounts if they want, anonymity is meant to be 1 level up from that. In effect this becomes a much more powerful AND dangerous feature.

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38

One account would make it harder to profile.

I wonder if anonymous users should not be able to like posts, since that could be another way to profile users. Also there isnā€™t much value of an anonymous userā€™s like. Also if it was one user, how would you handle multiple users doing that.

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39

Huh? Anons able to actually act like an user?

Shouldnā€™t the anon feature only let you post anonymously?

1 Like
40

Yes anon accounts should only be allowed to post, not like. Which is part of the reason a single account is much easier to implement, it makes the checks in guardian way cheaper.

3 Likes