Forum OpenACS Development: Anonymous Postings

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1: Anonymous Postings
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/31/04 07:48 AM
Inspired by https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/bug?bug%5fnumber=1463 I thought of anonymous posting capabilities.

Would this work ?

"Anonymous coward" posting abilities. The way I see it is to add a user "anonymous coward" to OpenACS, that is *not* a member of "Registered Users". Furthermore you add a link to automatically log you in as "anonymous coward" at the login page. After that you can enable anonymous postings by giving write access to "anonymous coward".

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2: Re: Anonymous Postings (response to 1)
Posted by Mark Aufflick on 02/02/04 08:20 AM
Certainly it's trivial to allow anonymous posting of comments - on my website (http://mark.aufflick.com/) you can make a general comment without logging in - I just removed the requirement to be uid != 0 on the relevant GC pages, and from memory I had to manually add an entry for UID 0 in users (or persons - one of the two) although i believe this is done by default in 5.0? (My site is based on 4.6.?)

I don't see why the same system couldn't work for posting. If the UID is 0 place a large red suggestion that they login (a nice drawcard would be to get added functionality like editing their posts - like logged in users can edit their general comments) and then just let them post anyway even if they chose not to register.

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3: Re: Anonymous Postings (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 02/02/04 10:24 AM
Exactly what I already did for forums in 5.0. Made user_id = 0 a user, and, if "The Public" have create permissions on the forums instance, I allow anonymous postings.

Re the bug, even if we don't support anonymous comments, the trick of not bouncing for login until the user has already committed and effort to write a posting is an old one to get more people to register.

/Lars

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4: Re: Anonymous Postings (response to 3)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 02/02/04 12:21 PM
Can either of you add a code snippet here, so whenever someone feels the need to enhance a package with anonymous posting capabilities, it is documented how to do this. Thanks in advance.
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5: Re: Anonymous Postings (response to 1)
Posted by Mark Aufflick on 02/03/04 12:36 AM
Well it looks like the code changes are their in OpenACS 5 - you just need to give the appropriate permissions to "Unregistered Visitor" exactly as you would expect.