# Open (anon) interaction with a forum
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [February 9, 2022, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263 "2022-02-09T10:21:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/1 "2022-02-09T10:21:26Z")
> [@Page Publishing](https://meta.discourse.org/t/page-publishing/151971):
>
> bookmark This guide covers how to use the Page Publishing feature on Discourse. This feature allows Staff users to convert a topic into a standalone static page with custom styling. Examples include the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages. person_raising_hand Required user level: Staff Publishing static pages on Discourse Page Publishing allows Staff users to create standalone static pages from topics. This is similar to the process for creating Terms of Service or Privacy Policy …
Hello!! 🙂
Thank you very much for this tutorial, it’s an awesome functionality, ideal form my use case 🙂
My only problem is that I’m unable to edit a public wiki, it’s there some other setting I’m missing?
For context, I published a topic that is inside of a private category (that might be interfering?). I’m not able to edit it even myself.
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:33am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/2 "2022-02-09T10:33:42Z")
Hi @lisandro_iaffar
> [@lisandro\_iaffar](#):
>
> I’m not able to edit it even myself.
What is your status there? Administrator, moderator or general user?
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:36am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/3 "2022-02-09T10:36:21Z")
Hi Anatol! Thank you very much for answering so quickly! 🙂
Sorry for not clarifying, I’m the Admin of the forum, I created it
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:47am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/4 "2022-02-09T10:47:41Z")
As admin you should be able to edit anything enywhere.
As I’m checking on my Discourse instance - I can set a topic as a Wiki in “staff” private category and edit it successfully.
And of course I don’t have access to it as users that don’t have access to that private category.
To check your situation - can you change your user to “system” and try to edit?
Go to /admin/users/-1/system
and “impersonate” it (button at the bottom)
And try to edit the post.
P.S. You will need to Sign Out and Login to your usual account afterwards.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/5 "2022-02-09T10:54:36Z")
I’m very sorry Anatol, I realize I expressed myself quite incorrectly… 😅
I’m indeed able to edit the topic in the way you indicated.
What I meant, as for what I understood from the expression:
> [@Page Publishing](https://meta.discourse.org/t/page-publishing/151971/1):
>
> It’s possible to “publish” a wiki page, which means every member, not only Staff, can update it.
Is that I’m not able to edit the published wiki from the public URL. Did I totally misinterpreted what he meant?.. 😅
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/6 "2022-02-09T10:56:19Z")
No worries @lisandro_iaffar 🙂 We are here to help.
Let me double check this.
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 11:05am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/7 "2022-02-09T11:05:39Z")
Yes, it seems that I can’t edit published page from itself - only as a topic.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 11:18am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/8 "2022-02-09T11:18:50Z")
Ok!! Thank you very much for verifying Anatol 🙂
So now I can be sure it’s not something I messed up 😅
I guess it’s not possible then. That’s regretable, it could allow for excellent ad-hoc collaboration in which a forum acts as a temporal hub (then as an Archive, hopefully, public). Not forcing a user to register for what could be only a one-time collaboration can be very encouraging to actually use the forum as a social tool, indirectly encouraging future adoption.
Anyways, publishing is pretty cool already 🙂
I have to abuse your kindness one last time, let me ask: it’s possible to find the published page by searching trough google? (for my current use case, I hope not :P)
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 11:27am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/9 "2022-02-09T11:27:57Z")
> [@lisandro\_iaffar](#):
>
> it’s possible to find the published page by searching trough google
I know the answer for that \o/ (I’m so happy because normally I don’t know anything about Discourse 😄 )
Yes if your forum is open for everyone without login.
And even then no, or maybe, if there is no public links to url of that page AND it is not mentioned at sitemap. But it is good policy to see things like if something is not behind login all scrawlers can reach it.
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 11:32am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/10 "2022-02-09T11:32:21Z")
There are a few potential options I think:
# 1
For the interaction without registration - you can probably try to adopt Custom Wizard plugin (I’m not sure if they have this feature already), but I think it can be possible to request it on [marketplace](https://meta.discourse.org/c/marketplace/).
> **[Pavilion](https://pavilion.tech/)**
>
> Pavilion is the leading Discourse consultancy.
# 2
As @angus mentioned in the same post:
> We’re actually about to release a “landing pages” plugin for discourse which includes a contact forum module, which is better suited to this use case. Stay tuned for that.
[The plugin exists](https://meta.discourse.org/t/landing-pages-plugin/180967) but I’m not sure if this feature is ready - probably you can already use contact form from published Landing Page.
# 3
It’s possible to create a special user on your forum and create posts for not registered users by API - f.e. from Google Forms or any other service.
I can help with that.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 11:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/11 "2022-02-09T11:56:13Z")
Thank you for your help @Jagster , and thank you so much @4ong
Sorry for the delay, I wanted to go trough your links before answering. The Landing Pages plugin is Absolutely-Awesome 😮!!!
I’m sure that’s the functionality I’m after, I’m going to dig further, thank you very much Anatol for facilitating the links, for my use case I was not going to match the key phrases to find them 😛
As always, I hope to be able to pay back to this awesome community 😁
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### Author:  [@angus](https://meta.discourse.org/u/angus)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 10:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/12 "2022-02-09T22:08:41Z")
> [@4ong](#):
>
> > We’re actually about to release a “landing pages” plugin for discourse which includes a contact forum module, which is better suited to this use case. Stay tuned for that.
>
> [The plugin exists](https://meta.discourse.org/t/landing-pages-plugin/180967) but I’m not sure if this feature is ready - probably you can already use contact form from published Landing Page.
The contact form module is explained in the documentation here
> **[Pavilion](https://pavilion.tech/)**
>
> Pavilion is the leading Discourse consultancy.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2022, 1:36pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/13 "2022-02-10T13:36:06Z")
> [@lisandro\_iaffar](#):
>
> I have to abuse your kindness one last time, let me ask: it’s possible to find the published page by searching trough google? (for my current use case, I hope not :P)
You can probably add that specific URL to you `/robots.txt` to avoid it being indexed by search engines.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2022, 10:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/14 "2022-02-10T22:44:47Z")
Excellent!! Thank you!! 🙂
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2022, 7:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/15 "2022-02-12T19:12:47Z")
> [@hellekin](#):
>
> URL to you `/robots.txt` to avoid it being indexed by search engines
It is actually only request. Not even Google follows that, they make theirs own decision.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [February 14, 2022, 8:32am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/16 "2022-02-14T08:32:58Z")
From their documentation, your statement is wrong. What they say is:
> A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; **it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google**. To keep a web page out of Google, [block indexing with `noindex`](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/block-indexing) or password-protect the page.
They do use it, but:
> If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page.
So the best option, @lisandro_iaffar, would be to avoid linking to that page, and use `noindex` meta tag on that page: ``. But without using `robots.txt`, since the crawler needs to see the page to read the meta tag.
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [February 14, 2022, 8:40am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/17 "2022-02-14T08:40:28Z")
> [@hellekin](#):
>
> your statement is wrong
I’m right. Theirs documentation is… overpositive. You can google the right answer really quickly — good starting point is what googlebot itself does or not. And after that basics of robots.txt.
But you don’t need trust on me or anybody else. You can try it. First you should check out all visited bots. And after that how many of those have looked robots.txt. You will be suprised 😉 You have plenty of too active bots and you can use robots.txt to slow down them. After a couple of days you’ll get the answer.
That is more or less waste of time, though. Issues of robots.txt are widely known.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 14, 2022, 10:46am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/18 "2022-02-14T10:46:00Z")
Excellent information I’m keeping for future work. Privacy is going to be important for many applications in my forum. Thank you both for your insights, @hellekin and @Jagster , it’s greatly appreciated 😁
I’m going to have that level of care for critical situations. By now, I have tried many times yet I have been unable to find the published pages via google search (not even using complete quoted key phrases), which is already good enough for the level of privacy required in this case. (Further, the pages are not going to be published for ever, I will unpublish them once they purpose ends, so it will not pose any risk in the long term).
Thank very much again!! 🙏 😁
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### Author:  [@4ong](https://meta.discourse.org/u/4ong)
#### Post date: [February 23, 2022, 11:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/19 "2022-02-23T11:39:40Z")
> [@lisandro\_iaffar](#):
>
> Not forcing a user to register for what could be only a one-time collaboration can be very encouraging to actually use the forum as a social tool, indirectly encouraging future adoption.
I’m getting back to you @lisandro_iaffar as there is a new thing that may be useful in your case - [GitHub - alangibson/discourse-loners: Discourse Loners plugin allows unregistered users to watch and reply to topics using only their email addresses. · GitHub](https://github.com/alangibson/discourse-loners)
> The Loners plugin allows unregistered users to watch and reply to topics using only their email addresses.
P.S. I’ve tried it only briefly so it’s better to test it intensively beforehand.
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### Author:  [@lisandro\_iaffar](https://meta.discourse.org/u/lisandro_iaffar)
#### Post date: [February 23, 2022, 12:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/open-anon-interaction-with-a-forum/219263/20 "2022-02-23T12:56:50Z")
Hi @4ong!! 😁
Thank very much for pointing to this plugin, this topic is becoming a complete wiki on open interaction 🙂
For my particular case, it will be much better to have that kind of functionality if it could be restricted to certain categories, which is not the case for now. But I will keep an eye on it in case it gets implemented.
Thank you again Anatol, I really appreciate your time and kind help 🙂
It’s my intention to pay back to the Discourse community by showing how this wonderful tool can be used as an efficient vector to implement open-source governance and open-source politics. Wish me luck 🙏 😅