| Semi-anonymous user [message #17998] |
Wed, 28 April 2004 18:36  |
Gribnif
Messages: 82
Registered: December 2003
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I'll bet the answer to this suggestion will be "no", but we really do have a need for it, so I figured I should ask.
On our site, we need to be able to creat private forums that only certain people can use. But it needs to be only the people that we choose to allow in.
We can't have users sign up for their own account and then request permission to enter a forum, because then we have no way of verifying that they should be allowed in. We don't always know the email addresses of the people we want to allow in in advance. Sometimes it will just be people who are sent a postcard in the mail.
The usual "Anonymous" account can't be used for this purpose, since it can't read any forums on my system. I need to be able to limit who can read each forum.
Instead, I think we need to be able to have a single account that can be used by all the users of a single forum, but not others. The forum's administrator would give out the same username and password to all potential users of the forum, but it would only be usable in that one forum.
I can't just create any old account for this purpose, because there are several problems:
1. Any user can change the password or email address, thus ruining the account for everyone else.
2. Any settings changes made by one user of the account will affect the other users.
3. The lists of what messages have already been read will get shared among all users of the account.
So, I guess what I'm proposing is a special kind of flag which would cause any account to be treated like the Anonymous account (can't change password, no settings changes, etc.) But it would be assignable to groups, so I can control which forums it can post to or read.
The icing on the cake would be to add a field to the New Thread and Reply forms, allowing the user to add their own username and email address to their post. I realize that this would be insecure, and easy for them to spoof, but at this level that's not too important to me. It's more important that they had to authenticate to get into the forum in the first place.
I realize this feature might be of limited use, but it's the only way I can see around this problem we're having. It's what's keeping us from completely doing away with wwwboard, which I want to do because it's so old and so attractive to spammers.
I'd be willing to help make the code changes, but unless I knew they are going to be incorporated into the full program, it would be difficult to justify. The number of customizations I have to make now when installing a new version is already pretty large, and I think this feature change will require a lot of small changes to a number of source files.
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