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+3 votes
2.8k views
in Q2A Core by

In current versions of q&a software any one can post, comment, answer anonymously. It is a good idea but i wanna build a form for anonymous posting like superuser.com has...

So in posts instead  of "asked 1 hour ago by anonymous" it will show the name of a anonymous user.. ?

Please help me to build a such anonymous posting system ........

Q2A version: 1.5.3

3 Answers

+2 votes
by
I'm afraid it requires a major architectural change to Q2A and is not easy to do. If there is enough demand I might add this in a future major version release.
by
+1
Please do it because Post by anonymous is a super ugly .....
by
An easier idea that I'm struggling with is using the "extra field" as a Name,Location. I'm trying to figure out how to get that field to replace the "anonymous" when it's displayed. If you can figure out a patch I'm sure a lot of people would be interested until you can make it a feature
by
of course extra field would also be nice to have on answers :)
by
please include this modification in v1.6
+1 vote
by
I took a quick look at this, and I was able to use an extra field (Name) and replace the "by anonymous" with by Name in the view question page with just a few lines of code. But its a little more difficult in the Questions page because the extra field doesnt seem to be included in the content array. Hopefully someone more familiar with the code can help.

The idea is to use the Extra field as the anonymous posters Name, or Name, Location or whatever you want. When displaying, check for "anonymous" and replace it with the value of the extra field. So the questions will have

 

asked 12 minutes ago by [extra field name]

anonymous all over the place is very ugly and very impersonal.
by
would be cool if the chosen "name" would be bound to the IP for a couple of time, so that if anonymous posts again, he can be reidentified!
by
The anonymous/IP info is preserved, so you can still view the history. Of course if the user is mobile and gets a new IP you won't be able to tell either way.
0 votes
by
Ha!  I've been working on this one for the last 2 days ;)
While I can get the Name field into the form and validate the entry posted, I decided the best way to go was to just make the email field required and use the first part of the email as a hidden handle.

The only thing with this approach is that we need to create that user record 'Before' the question gets posted.  And that's where the problems begin.  
We use the 'filter' module to make the email required, But we can't create the new anonymous user here because we need all other validations to pass (We could totally overwrite filter_question here but that is way kludgy).
We can't use the Event module after the Filter module because the Event module only tells us what has Happened, not what is About to Happen.
So we take a look at the Process Module (this is where I'm at now) but in ALL the plugins, themes available in Q2A, Not One has made use of this module and the documentation shows no use cases so I'm fumbling here.
BUT, the best thing I can see for the inclusion into 1.6 is a 'Listener' Module.
This Listener module would act a Lot like the Event module but be triggered Before the Event takes place.  This would allow us to easily introduce new business logic that would seem to hard to implement within the current structure of Q2A.

With this new 'Listener' module we could do things like (knowing our data has passed the filter test), create a user record if that email address isn't already in the database, before the question gets inserted.  This way we can associate those questions with this user as soon as they decide to 'Register' with us :)

Anyways, your thoughts on a Listener module would be great. And anyones knowledge with some use tips on the Process module would be even greater right now. :)

 

Just my 50 cents worth :)
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