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Is this a thing? Someone said this is a feature but I can not find any such thing. That is, having anonymous posters without registration. Similar to a text board or an image board, I suppose.

I've seen some people say this is a stupid idea, but look at 4chan and others like that. It definitely has it's drawbacks like you'll need to have a good anti-span system or captcha, but also has it's positive sides. It stops seniority, easier access for actual posters, is incentive to post, anonymity of course. With the benefit of retaining posts, unlike most anonymous or text boards which delete content after a certain about of time.

Anyways, I've looked around, seen plenty of people asking for such a plugin or feature on MyBB and other forum software but have yet to see anything like this.

What about something like giving the guest usergroup the same abilities as the registered group? They would all be called Guest though I think which would probably be an issue.

Hm... Well, I suppose that would be the next best thing. Can you even change the guest group to allow them to post?

I'll give it a shot, I suppose. Seems like it would be better suited to have a plugin for settings and all.

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I guess I never realized that there were all of these settings. I don't know how I didn't notice that you could change all of this. I just searched it for a while and a bunch of people were saying this functionality didn't exist and that there were no plugins for it. My mistake. I guess this was a waste of a thread.

Apologies.

No worries, not a waste of a thread. It definitely would be better suited as a plugin, but that would be pretty complicated and this is an OK solution for most I'd imagine!

Yeah it's not bad. I've been playing around with it on some free subdomain. If you want to check it out (not my real site, I just use this to test things out). (BOARD LINK REMOVED), Not sure when I'll change it but it's there for now if you want to see how the guest posting works for yourself.

It definitely would be more suited for a plugin, if someone had the time to make one.

The name field requires {username} in it. So if you wanted something more clever than guest and wanted the name to be Anonymous, or Incognito or something to that effect, it would be Anonymous {username} making the poster's name Anonymous Guest by default or Anonymous [whatever they set their name as when posting].

Something like "Unregistered - {username}" seems better because if they set their own name it would be "Unregistered - Palmer" or "Unregistered - Guest" for example.

It would be much better if it didn't require the {username}, making guest posters a little more uniform, which is where it would be better suited as a plugin I think. However, I have not tried renaming the entire guest category to something else or any of that. I don't know that it would even change anything. I just checked the boxes allowing guests to post and create threads basically. Haven't played around with it too much yet.

This is the post when leaving the "name" field blank when posting as guest (set as Anonymous {username} as test).



This is how it appears from the menu when it 



Otherwise you can set a guest poster's avatar, stars and all that, which is pretty cool.

This isn't bad for a quick workaround, but a plugin would definitely be nicer.

Yeah the issue with this being a plugin is that it involves a lot of core rewriting, which is not ideal. At that point you're almost looking for an entirely different platform, MyBB just isn't designed for anonymous posting. Is them having to type a name that bad though? Helps you identify individual users at least; if they're that concerned about privacy I'd imagine they'd be knowledgeable about staying somewhat anonymous. If you're trying to run a truly anonymous 4chan type board then there are probably better platforms for that out there(/ make your own).

I'm glad you tested it out though, that's cool. I've never done it myself and always wondered if it would work and seems like it's not a bad solution as you said.

(2017-07-18, 08:21 AM)fizz Wrote: [ -> ]Yeah the issue with this being a plugin is that it involves a lot of core rewriting, which is not ideal. At that point you're almost looking for an entirely different platform, MyBB just isn't designed for anonymous posting. Is them having to type a name that bad though? Helps you identify individual users at least; if they're that concerned about privacy I'd imagine they'd be knowledgeable about staying somewhat anonymous. If you're trying  to run a truly anonymous 4chan type board then there are probably better platforms for that out there(/ make your own).

I'm glad you tested it out though, that's cool. I've never done it myself and always wondered if it would work and seems like it's not a bad solution as you said.

The point is that you won't be able to identify the individual users. Defeating the elitist seniority mindset and promoting content. Any forum that's moderately successful has these issues. Registering or being identified discourages people sometimes, so this fixes half of that problem. It doesn't stop the seniority elitism but I guess that's not even really a big deal. For moderation the IP is enough. When you allow guest posting a captcha is automatically enabled for guest users only, which is very cool and saves me a lot of trouble dealing with plugins (although it's basic and when I do implement this I will probably just use reCAPTCHA anyways).

You're probably right, it would likely take a lot of work and rewriting code. My problem is that my knowledge of PHP and front-end design (like CSS and such) are seriously out of date. I haven't played with that stuff in forever or I'd just do it myself. The idea I had in mind was something like an image board, similar to 4chan, but where content isn't deleted after X amount of posts and also in a different style.

More than anything I wanted to experiment with MyBB's features when the idea of a more western-styled, anonymous text board popped in to my head. I know they exist but you don't see them very often at all. Most people think of sites like 4chan, 7chan, 8ch, etc, etc. when they think of an anonymous board, which are dime a dozen and don't promote quality content since they're deleted shortly anyways.

Here's a couple more pics, should anyone want to see some differences without changing the settings themselves.

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