Use cases for anonymous posting feature

Community Building

AI-generated summary

A discussion on the use cases for anonymous posting features highlights the importance of distinguishing between anonymity from other users versus anonymity from administrators. murphyke points out that in some communities, users want to remain anonymous to hide from other users, but not from admins, to feel comfortable asking questions without revealing their identity. This can be particularly crucial for small communities where users’ shyness about revealing ignorance might hinder participation. anon65426961 agrees with this distinction, suggesting that enabling anonymous posting while still allowing moderators/administrators to identify users can be beneficial. They also mention the email-to-post feature as a potential way for users to ask questions without creating a forum account.

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I was reading Finding originating account of anonymous posts and I wanted to chime in but found that it was locked.

I think many people assume that users want to become anonymous to hide from both admins and other users, but in our community some users desire to become anonymous only to hide from other users, not admins. Many, quite possibly most, people are extremely shy about revealing ignorance, and so they won’t post questions of a certain type if people know who they are. What this does is drastically shrink the effective “active” size of a community. It’s not noticeable in huge internet-scale communities, but it can make a small community completely non-viable. So for communities like this, making it easy for admins to identify anonymous posters can be very helpful – and is not a violation of privacy as long as the correct language is used around enabling the anonymizing feature.

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That is an important distinction, for people to be anonymous to other users so they can speak more freely but not necessarily anonymous to moderators/administrators.

I’m not familiar with how that feature works with Discourse, but I believe with the e-mail to post feature that is a way someone can send in a question by e-mail to be posted on a forum without them needing to create a forum account?

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