Feature/Plugin Request: Mark a forum as "Anonymous"

Lyndsy

I'd like to be able to designate a particular subforum as anonymous to all users except admins.

The only forum that I can think of that has similar functionality is 4chan's /b/, although that probably isn't a safe example

I'm trying to build a place where a community can have frank discussions about a topic without having their opinions tied to their name.

cdavid

Vanilla does not yet support anonymous posting yet since there is no good anti-spam system.

/cd

Tim

The idea of anonymous posting is not bad, but there are some serious technical factors to be considered before we can implement it properly. We plan to get to this eventually though.

Lyndsy

Let me re-iterate - I'd like to require that users be logged-in, and that their username be tied to the thread/reply on the back end. I'd only like to hide the user info from the front side.

Linc

Ah, got it. That actually wouldn't be a terribly complicated plugin. Something that hooks into the Discussions and Discussion controllers and overwrites user names and IDs if it matches a particular category.

Lyndsy

Good to know. This functionality is in the mid-term plan for my community, so I'll add it to my list of customizations to look at.

I have to say, after using Vanilla for a few days, I'm really beginning to like a lot about it -- I hope I can contribute some quality functionality in the form of plugins in the future!

Linc

@Lyndsy Looking forward to it!

garymardell

One thing to keep in mind is removing the discussion from the activity stream when it gets posted. Also if you want to replace the username with something like then you may want to create the account with that name, otherwise someone may sign up with that name. The rest can be just methods to override the controllers before render to change the usernames to anonymous (whatever you want).

Lyndsy

Loving the community here -- my use for Vanilla is just one side project amongst a small sea of side projects for me, but through your posts here and reading the code on breaks at work, I'm getting up to speed very quickly.