Pseudonymity within a forum?

[seebs]

So, I have an idea for a thing, and a forum would be a good way to do it.

But for various reasons (the forum would involve some topics for which it'd be important to be able to keep people from connecting two different posts as being from the same poster. And this would be common enough that I really don't want to make people make several accounts.

So what I'd be looking for is a way to let users pick one of several pseudonyms for each post/message, and have there be nothing (not even things like uid=N in the html source) which reveals the base user to non-admin types. And I am wondering if this is something someone's already done.

I'm also wondering if I've missed something that would give slightly more detail on what's involved in writing for this; like, I see a requirement for PHP, so I assume the software is in PHP, but I don't see anything very specific about that.

 

[TPerry]

For requirements, at the very bottom of the page - https://xenforo.com/purchase/
For the posting, there are a couple of anonymous add-on that allows users to post anonymously
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/anonymous-posts-and-threads-by-waindigo.2868/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/bd-anonymous-posting.970/

 

[seebs]

"Requirements" aren't quite the same thing as "which languages do I have to know to work on this".

Anonymous posting isn't quite what I'm looking for. I want the ability to have recognizable, persistent, names... But have several such names per account so users don't have to relog constantly to use them.

 

[TPerry]

"Requirements" aren't quite the same thing as "which languages do I have to know to work on this".

You specifically asked about the requirements of the software, not what "language" was it written in - which, by the way is a PHP script with some JS.

Anonymous posting isn't quite what I'm looking for. I want the ability to have recognizable, persistent, names... But have several such names per account so users don't have to relog constantly to use them.

Not natively, and I did not find any add-ons that allow that in the resource manager - so you would probably need to go the bespoke route.

 

[seebs]

What I meant by "writing for this" was "altering the code" (or writing addons). I was mentioning the requirements in that they were the thing I saw that seemed to suggest it'd be PHP.

And I can in general write code if I need to, so I can probably do that, but this leaves me with the difficulty that I probably have to actually buy the software to get the kind of access I'd need to determine whether I can use it, because the feature doesn't exist yet, so I'd have to read the code to see whether I'd be comfortable trying to write a suitable mod. (Which ends up being a slight argument for xenforo over vB, because I have to buy either to find out whether I can make the code do stuff, and xenforo's cheaper.)

I don't suppose there's any way to browse some of the code *without* buying things? Because, obviously, I want to have some kind of idea what I'm getting into before I spend money. And my experience with software in PHP has been a very, very, very, mixed bag.

 

[Paul B]

You would need to purchase a license in order to be able to access the code.

 

[seebs]

Anyone got any ideas on how easy/hard it would be to add multiple posting identities to single accounts? I don't have any idea how thoroughly embedded user IDs and the like are in the code, obviously. And I'd rather have something a little nicer than something like phpbb, because I really haven't been very happy with those in the past, but I really want some kind of clue of whether it is practical to implement this feature...

 

[seebs]

Okay, to clarify my question about development:

Is the intent that modders would be writing in PHP, or is the PHP just a delivery mechanism for, say, a custom language or something? I can't download sample mods or read tutorials without having bought the software, so right now, I'm sitting at "I have no idea at all what would be involved in modding this". For all I know, the PHP deliverables are heavily machine-obfuscated code used entirely to implement a domain-specific language, and I'd have to write any mods in that. Or maybe it's the cleanest and prettiest PHP ever. And I have no idea, and can't seem to access anything that would tell me...

 

[Paul B]

The software is written in PHP (MVC).

 

[seebs]

Okay, thanks.

I guess I just end up being unsure whether or not what I want to do is feasible, and while I could probably tell by reading code for a few hours, I have to spend money to find out whether I can actually do the thing I want to do. And if I can't do it, then that's sort of a waste of money.

... of course, the likely alternative would be phpBB, where my evaluation so far is that I probably can do it, but it looks pretty hard and annoying to work with. But I don't have any way to tell whether the XF code is going to be any easier for me to do what I want in...

 

[Ridemonkey]

You could look at this pre-existing add-on:
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/sub-accounts-by-waindigo.2203/

Jon notes that a couple of his other add-ons (post as user and login as user) work with the sub-account add-on to allow users to quickly post as other names.

I haven't tried it but you could certainly contact @Jon W to get some details.

 

[seebs]

Oh, hey, that looks like it'd probably work. Neat. And given the existence of such a thing, I can at least conclude that it's obviously possible. Very helpful, thanks!