Semi-anonymous user

For Drupal 6

Semi-anonymous user is an interoperability extension for external authentication. Data you wish to store remotely from the Drupal database about users in an external authentication configuration is made available and usable for other modules without needing to be recorded in the users table.

Semi-anonymous user creates real, temporary users in Drupal for Drupal to associate with your external data but it does not give those users any of your external data. $_SESSION and {session} only are used, not {users} and the data persists only as long as your php session ID. Then the semi-anonymous user implements hook_user() to retrieve it's session data, making it available in the global user for other modules to use.

You can use this module's functions to present profile and custom, personal information which can not, or should not reside in Drupal's database safely to the Drupal user as if it did.

How it works - Once your module has gathered it's user data, you should call semianonuser_do_login and pass an associative array.
semianonuser_do_login(array('detail' => 'thing about user', 'email' => 'email address')); Anything passed in will appear in the global user array to all other modules, so pass in anything you wish to see available.

When you are logging out your user or destrying their session call semianonuser_do_logout(). Your data will not be entered into the user table, instead a randomly generated username will be created and entered into the user table with a bare minimum of detail instead. Your data is stored in the php session and merged onto this random user to create the global Drupal user letting all Drupal modules see the details you're hiding.

If a logout occurs, or the session's expiry time elapses this sesion table row is deleted. Cron will clean out all semi-anonymous users 24 hours after their last access. hook_unistall is implemented to clean up after uninstallation.

Link to sandbox project:
http://drupal.org/sandbox/unclebob/1783002

Git Clone
http://git.drupal.org/sandbox/unclebob/1783002.git