Forum OpenACS Development: Should object_id 0 be a user or a person?

having a choice to post anonymously would be cool in Forums and General Comments, for instance - if configured that way, of course.

Would it be useful to also allow a "group" or organization (i.e., a party) to post a collective statement ... semi-anonymous postings, sort of?

The system already returns 0 for user_id if the user is not logged in. This should work under any subsite. I don't see a need for a seperate not logged in user for every subsite. The question here is that object_id 0 is a person, but not a user.

Would changing the foreign key from users to persons accomplish the same goal, allowing anonymous postings (if desired) which not giving object_id 0 a user portrait etc.

This also would allow users to be removed, which keeping the person row existing. I am not sure what other kind of problems this might bring up. I am sure someone will let me know :)

Barry, don't worry, this change won't be made without considering the consequences.  And if we do make the change the default permissions which only allow registered users to write content would remain in force (person_id 0 is a member of "The Public" but not "Registered Users" and that would *not* change)  So unless someone makes an explicit choice to allow The Public (or person_id 0 explicitly) to write new content no coding error other than failing to check permissions could allow someone not logged in to create content - and if permissions aren't checked that's true regardless of how we represent a user that's not logged in.

And since the default membership group for the main subsite is "Registered Users" and since subsites can only draw new members from their parent's membership group making person 0 a user would require that the admin *explicitly* add the "Unregistered Visitor" (as person 0 is called today) to the main subsite.

So I think most of your objections would, in practice, be met if this change were made.

- granted 'forum_create' to "The Public" (turns out the privilege 'forum_post' isn't used anywhere at all, we should remove it)

- insert into users (user_id) values (0);

Lo and behold, without any further changes, I can now make anonymous postings to forums, and they show up as having been made by "Unregistered Visitor".

The only glitch I can see is that when you click through the name to see the forums posting by Unregistered, and then click  through the name again to see the user's community-member page, that page just says:

"No user found
There is no community member with the user_id of 0"

Because the unregistered user isn't in cc_users, because that view only shows people who are part of 'registered users'. Which is probably the way we want to keep it, so we just need the community-member page to special-case the unregistered visitor user and say something meaningful then. Trivial fix.

Now, the only tricky problem I see is one of UI: I think we still want to *encourage* people to sign in, even though they *can* post anonymously.

The best way I can think of to do that is to still redirect to the login page, but then have an option there that says "continue as anonymous guest user" or something to that effect. We should probably make it a page parameter to determine whether we should offer that option or not, as clearly in most cases we do not. Yet.

So [ad_redirect_for_registration -allow_anonymous]?

The drawback is that we're going to flash this login page every single time you want to do something where we encourage you to log in, such as posting to the forums.

How does that sound?

/Lars

That's a fairly simple thing to do once we have the other part. That would just involve a checkbox that says "post anonymously", and, if checked, we create the post with user_id 0.

/Lars

When a student fills out a course evaluation the UI should never associate a specific response with a specific student, even to an administrator.  However, the system must keep track of the fact that a specific student has replied, so that they can only reply once, students who haven't replied can be spammed and reminded to reply, etc.

In addition, the people I interviewed would like to be able to find out who made a reply in extreme circumstances (for instance an abusive or threatening response). Having a programmer able to query the real user_id is sqlplus/pgsql would meet this requirement.

I always liked using negative integers for objects that should only be created for special purposes. They stay out of the way of regular objects. Having an overloaded object_id "0" seems like a quick and easy way to run into problems. What is the reason that only one such account needs to exist? I really would not like to mix up anonymous for x application with anonymous for y application, because anonymous can have many different meanings.

Caroline makes a good point. However anonymous a user might need to be to certain audiences, they should never be untraceably anonymous, we all know we need to track users, even if they are transient, or need to make certain statements without everyone knowing who they are.

Additionally, an anonymous user may wish to have consistent identity on the website, even if it isn't associated with a valid email or real name. At some point in time they may wish to convert their account to a non-anonymous account.

If anonymous accounts exist, they should be easy to create, maybe requiring only a (screen)name and password. It might also be nice to add the ability of anonymous users to post without using cookies, by providing the name/password at the time of the post, or as a second step to posting without being logged in. However, this might make it a little too easy for a program to create many accounts just by posting to a single page.

Anyway, I look forward to all these new features that are coming down the pipeline and hope to add a few of my own.