Anonymous Publishing

The Anonymous Publishing project is intended to increase your control over anonymous publishing on a site.

• Allowing anonymous publishing (posting without first having to register) may lower the threshold for authorship and entry to a site.
• Sites that deal with sensitive issues, (e.g. whistle­blower sites, health information exchanges) may want to provide their users with the ability to publish anonymously.

Its intended audience are site developers and administrators that want to lower the threshold for participation, enhance privacy, or both.

Typical applications include classified advertising (craiglist style), visitor guestbooks, imageboards, social media.

It is part of The PET project. For more information, visit The PET project website.

Features

In Drupal, the administrator may grant the anonymous user the right to create new content (so you don't need this module to allow anonymous users to create content). However, allowing anonymous publishing may have the side-effect of making the site wide open to spammers. This module may be used to mitigate that. Also, it implements a privacy enhancing technology (PET) that allows authenticated users to publish anonymously.

The major features of Anonymous Publishing are:

1. Users may publish content without first registering an account at the site, provided they supply a vaild e-mail address and click on an activation link sent them in a verification e-mail (some call this the "Craig's List model"). To use this feature enable the Anonymous Publishing CL submodule.
2. "Lazy" registration, where content previously created anonymously by the user using Anonymous Publishing CL can be "claimed" by the user after registering on the site. If you enable this submodule, there will be a tab named "Claim anonymous posts" on the profile page of users with "unclaimed" content they created on the site before they registered. To use this feature enable the Anonymous Publishing LR submodule.
3. Authenticated users may publish content that appear to be published by Anonymous (i.e. they need to be authenticated and logged in to publish, but the content they tag as anonymous will never be publicly associated with their user name or other identity). To use this feature enable the Anonymous Publishing PET submodule.
4. The pseudo-fields “email” and “byline” will be exposed to Views if the Anonymous Publishing Views submodule is enabled.

More specifically, it may:

• Let anonymous publishers self-activate;
• retain self-activated e-mail addresses for future use;
• send e-mail to administrators when anonymous content is created;
• provide simple moderation of content published anonymously;
• let the administrator block abusers based on e-mail & IP address;
• track spambots and let the administrator block them,
• provide flood control;
• purge records that links the identifier to specific content;
• let the administrator customize the verification e-mail;
• allow authenticated users to publish as the anonymous user;
• associate a persistent byline/alias with all content published anonymously;
• the persistent byline/alias can be default, generated or set by the publisher;
• the persistent byline/alias along with the email address used to activate, can be exposed to Views.

Limitations:

• Anonymous publishing can only be enabled for nodes and comments. It is not possible to enable anonymous publishing for other content such as webform submissions or poll votes.

Roadmap

A new submodule, tentatively named Anonymous Publishing ROLE, was planned (but are currently on hold, pending funding). This submodule shall let authenticated users set an alternative identity string that will be used as byline if a node they've authored is viewed by a recognized search engine robot and/or roles that are denied access to the publisher's identity.

Upgrading to Drupal 10 has begun, and a 2.0.x-dev release is available. Here is the current status of the upgrade:

• base module - upgraded.
• CL - upgrading has started, but is not stable, see issue queue
• LR - pending
• PET - pending
• Views - pending
• ROLE - pending
• test framework - pending

I am looking for a co-maintainer to oversee the port to Drupal 10 and to implement the pending components. Please post a comment in the D10 issue tracker if you want to work on the D10 port. MRs and reviews are also welcome.

Maintenance status

We currently have no clients using this module. That means that bugs and feature requests for this project will have low priority. But the project is being maintained and well-written patches that reaches RTBC will be committed in a timely manner. Considering sponsoring this project if you need it for a project if you want it to be given higher priority by its current maintainers.

Similar projects

The following projects may be used for some of the same use cases as this project:

• Anonymous posting - lets anonymous users fill in a name to be used instead of "Anonymous" when posting nodes without being logged in. AFAIK, it doesn't offer any form of anonymity, but allows pseudonyms by means of an alias.
• Create and Register. Implements "Lazy registration" by lettings users post content before they register. Unlike the the "lazy registration" implemented by this project, registration is expected to happen briefly after content is created. There is no way to "claim" content created several sessions ago.
• Inline Registration - adds a user registration form to a content creation page, so users can use a single form for registering and creating content. Does not offer any form of anonymity.

May replace

Anonymous Publishing may be used in place of the following module, which currently does not have a D7 or D10 port:

• Sign Up Problem.

If you find Anonymous Publishing useful as a replacement for an obsolete module, please post a notice about in the issue queue (use category "task" and component "documentation").

Authors

The project was initiated by dropcube (Ronny López) in 2008.

The current project owner and maintainer of all Drupal versions is Gisle Hannemyr (CTO of Hannemyr Nye Medier AS).

If want to contribute to our ongoing development of Anonymous Publishing, you may do so by using this link to donate using Paypal.

The initial port to D8 was done by Dom. (Dominique CLAUSE) at ACINO. I am looking for a co-maintainer to continue work on the D10 version.

The maintainer can be contacted for paid customizations of this module as well as Drupal consulting, installation, development, and customizations.