I think the problem is that Guests, by definition, are not member of any group. EE’s permission system, however, is based on belonging to a group. It’s not a trivial thing to change this, if I remember Paul correctly.
I think the problem is that Guests, by definition, are not member of any group. EE’s permission system, however, is based on belonging to a group. It’s not a trivial thing to change this, if I remember Paul correctly.
I wish I could understand why. It would make it great deal easier to accept. I have never ran into this kind of limitation on another forumsoftware. On the other hand I wouldnt qualify as a programmer so who am I to judge.... :(
The reason we didn’t make it available as an option is because it would have added a big layer of complexity. User permissions, posts, stats, moderators, administrators, etc. are all associated with the member ID, so without an ID, tracking and associating becomes a major undertaking. There are also serious security concerns. The bottom line is that given the exceeding rarity of anonymous forums (most forum packages don’t have this option), the amount of development time, and the security concerns, it is unlikely this feature will be added.
The reason we didn’t make it available as an option is because it would have added a big layer of complexity. User permissions, posts, stats, moderators, administrators, etc. are all associated with the member ID, so without an ID, tracking and associating becomes a major undertaking. There are also serious security concerns. The bottom line is that given the exceeding rarity of anonymous forums (most forum packages don’t have this option), the amount of development time, and the security concerns, it is unlikely this feature will be added.
OK. thanks for time explaning this. I’ll try to settle with this . For our concern it would have been a very nice ‘support’-solution since it to our audience is a bit of a deal registring on a site, simply just because they are not that used to internet forums in general.
So to balance my whining I feel I have to say that EE and the forum-module is a fantastic peace of software that let us worry about content instead of function. Thanks again!
It kind of seems like the powers that be have decided there will be no guest posting in the discussion forum module, though if there’s any chance of this being added as an option, I would definitely give it my vote of approval.
I’m still a little befuddled about the technical reasons why it can’t be done since guest posting is allowed in EE itself (i.e. for blog posts). But I’ll take the programmers word for it that it really would be difficult to implement.
I was really bummed to learn we can’t allow guests to post in a special forum. As long as some security measures like captchas, ip logging and time limits were inposed, I believe spam wouldn’t be moch of a problem. So far I have been happy with EE, but this not allowing guests to post is disapointing. I add my voice to request this feature in the next version.
We have seen this feature request and have not forgotten it, but I am sorry, guys, the odds of this happening are incredibly low. Guests are only a member group in the sense that we wanted an easy way for an admin to assign permissions to any and all non-logged in users. The guest is never assigned to a member group, they simply have those permissions when viewing the site.
Also, and to be clear there is no non-member posting to weblogs either, only for comments. Comments are incredibly basic in the system as they only require a few pieces of data, whereas there is far more involved with an actual member (username, signature, email address, unique id, member id, member group, authorization code for confirming registration, IP address, join date, activity data, and much more). The amount we do with a member account in various parts of EE is quite immense and the forum merely adds to that with topic and post counts, moderators, and admins. As Leslie mentioned in the snippet Ingmar quoted, it would be a very very large undertaking to do this. And that is not even considering the security concerns, which could be somewhat addressed with various security measures like CAPTCHAs and post limiting, it would never approach the security of having that person registered and part of an actual member group.
I am bringing this back to life as I am looking into developing a hook that will accomplish guest posting. I will have spam protection included but sorry no catcha or codes functionality, I do it without them as I consider them to take away from the users experience in regards to forums. An IP ban will be included along with a list.
Here is the unofficial feature list:
-IP Ban with admin viewable IP ban list, add, delete
-Guest cookie to keep their name
-Spam protection
The list is small but it’s really not all that just takes time;)
. For our concern it would have been a very nice ‘support’-solution since it to our audience is a bit of a deal registring on a site, simply just because they are not that used to internet forums in general.
