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For the NewBB module, I'd love to see an option to allow anonymous posting on a per-thread or per-category basis.
In other words, let's say that there's a thread called "Survivors of Suicide" or some such thing on the site. The webmaster doesn't want anyone but registered users to be able to post, but does want registered users to be able to post anonymously.
To accomplish this, probably the best option would be to have a checkbox that someone with moderator, administrator, or webmaster level rights could check (I'm assuming it wouldn't even appear for other users) that would enable anonymous posting on the thread.
If the anonymous posting was enabled, then registered users who went to post on the thread would be shown a checkbox when they posted that would give them the option to either post anonymously or post using their username.
If they chose to post anonymously, the database would not store their username, but would instead treat the message like it treats messages from users whose accounts have been deleted: the username comes up as anonymous, the signature doesn't appear, etc.
For purposes of avoiding abuse, we might want to log IP addresses and make those only available to the webmaster.
Also, I'm thinking that the option could be turned off at will by those with the appropriate rights. I don't think that would be a problem; the way I'm envisioning the code (logically, I mean, not technically; I don't know nearly enough about PHP or SQL to begin to do this hack myself...or I would!), the posts are written to the database as anonymous, so flipping the toggle would make no difference. The only downside is that the anonymous poster could not go back and edit his/her own post. I don't see that as a serious problem, though.
Thoughts?
