By waffle on

This is my first time posting, please be gentle... I hope this is the right place to talk about this.

Is it possible in Drupal 5 to allow an authenticated user to post a node or comment as an anonymous user?

Example: I am logged in as a regular authenticated user, and normally post content under my username, but I am creating a new node (or comment, etc.) about, say, an embarrassing personal topic, on the site, so I want to hide my username such that it does not display when another user views this one node on the site. It should not display my name anywhere, either the full node view or the node preview, etc. So I would like a checkbox that I can mark when creating a node/comment/etc. to say "post anonymously" so that this one node/comment/etc. will be posted anonymously.

However, the system (and the admin?) should still know that it is my node and so when I view the node, I should still be able to edit it and do any other actions to it because it is my node. It just needs to never be associated with me in the eyes of other users.

I don't think this is possible out of the box? I searched around Drupal.org and couldn't find anything, and I couldn't find any modules that will do this either, but maybe I missed something?

And if I were to implement it, would the right way to do it be to write a hook_nodeapi function that overwrites the user id when loading the node? Because then, would the user still be able to edit the node?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Paul.CW’s picture

Paul.CW commented

I would also be interested in this feature.

I've also thought about having this available to my users. What I am thinking, is to have a limited number of annonymous (fictitious) registered user accounts that a registered user can login as, thus posting as annonymous1, 2 etc. Of course I don't know yet if this would work under Drupal.
I also want to be careful not to defeat the whole objective of a community, but there are times when a community member must voice a strong objection or opinion and does not want to create hostilities, which could be counter productive to the overall aim to build unity and working relationships.

I'm new and glad to be a member, just opened my hosting account with DVH yesterday.

Thanks,

waffle’s picture

waffle commented

So I never got any responses to this and research into the problem proved unfruitful.

So we hacked drupal core to do it. Basically, the for some node that we want to show up as anonymous, that node's uid is stored as 0 in the database so it always looks like it is anonymous. We did this in the code, not by turning on any kind of setting in the admin panel or anything. Not sure if this is the best way. Hopefully the rest of the community has suggestions?