By pauldoc on

I originally posted this in the module development section but I think the question probably belongs here since I'm still trying to decide if Drupal is the right CMS choice for my site. Sorry for the re-post.

This might seem like a minor feature but it's pretty important to my site - Basically, I'd like to give users the ability make an anonymous forum post while logged in to their normal account (maybe just a checkbox). I was wondering if there is a module out there that provides such a function. If it's going to require module development I don't mind doing the work, but I'd be curios to know how daunting a task it will be. Any feedback on how to get this going would be be great.

I'm planning to use Drupal 6...

Thanks in advance!

Paul

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

duplicate node removed.

investigate the authorship.module

marquardt’s picture

marquardt commented

...or realname which seems to to be a bit more actively developed. And has a Drupal 6 version.

I'm not sure if that solves your need, though - both modules give you / your users the option to change how their names are displayed - including as 'anonymous' or so. The problem is that there's only a single replacement possible - if you want them to use proper names elsewhere on your site, this won't work. If the display name is changed in the user's profile, it will change everywhere. Do you expect that users will always post forum topics without displaying their names? In that case in might be easiest to change the theme so that forum posts (and comments?) don't display the author names at all.

Or you add a flag (with CCK) to forum posts, and add some magic in the theme that author names are printed dependent on the state of that flag, which would require some custom coding. I'm not sure if the same approach can be made to work with comments.

pauldoc’s picture

pauldoc commented

thanks for the feedback. I'm looking into both suggestions... The global replacement of the name is definitely what I'm trying to avoid but looking at these modules should give me some insight. It's not even a requirement that the "anonymous" postings remain linked to a specific user's account. If they were to become actual anonymous postings that wouldn't be a problem - in fact it would almost be better that way.

Thanks again!