Create topics anonymously

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

Less fanboy translation:

This feature would lower the barrier to entry in any community. Many people feel anxious about asking their first question for fear of sounding stupid in a group of peers. Whilst that fear is almost always unfounded, the ability to ask anonymously would be a big comfort.

Also - my community in particular deals with a lot of sensitive stuff and this would be a great way of removing identities from those conversations.

Thank you, @Scott Baldwin, for this idea, and @Onomatopoeia, for the extra input! I have a few questions:

• Would you like the community team to be able to see the account behind the anonymous post? 
• What should happen to the notifications and gamification rewards when a post is submitted anonymously?
• Should non-logged in users be able to post as well? Or an account should still be required for posting? 

I’m opening this idea for votes and other related use cases. Thanks again! 

Hey @Cristina!

• Would you like the community team to be able to see the account behind the anonymous post? 
  Yes - I’d like to restrict this by role
   
• What should happen to the notifications and gamification rewards when a post is submitted anonymously?
  Anonymous posts should not contribute to gamification. Notifications should work as normal. If you can work out a way to still mention the anonymous user without revealing their identity, that would be great.
   
• Should non-logged in users be able to post as well? Or an account should still be required for posting? 
  I have no view on this as all of my users are logged in :)

One other note - there should be some explanatory information for the user when they choose to contribute anonymously. Perhaps a tooltip explaining how it works?

@Cristina 

Would you like the community team to be able to see the account behind the anonymous post? 

Yes

What should happen to the notifications and gamification rewards when a post is submitted anonymously?

Should not contribute to gamification. Notifications should go back to the user account that the anonymous topic is tied to.

Should non-logged in users be able to post as well? Or an account should still be required for posting? 

Account still required to post

+1 on the points mentioned by @Onomatopoeia and @Scott Baldwin !

Pitching in here, as a recent brainstorm on how to stimulate community activity in our CS team ended with this being the top-voted idea. We have seen that the requirement to register on a portal (e.g., our elearning portal) is a big blocker for users to actually enter. Therefore, I would find it really valuable if people would be able to post to public categories without registering. Let them just fill out a name (could just be anonymous if they wanted) and add their message. I do think these posts should always be approved by a moderator before being published to prevent spam and uncontrolled anonymous complaining though.

 

Would you like the community team to be able to see the account behind the anonymous post? 

Not necessarily

What should happen to the notifications and gamification rewards when a post is submitted anonymously?

No gamification contribution or notifications if posted fully anonymous

Should non-logged in users be able to post as well? Or an account should still be required for posting? 

Should be possible to post as non-logged in user to keep the barrier for entry really low

​@olimarrio ​@Kenneth R  Do you know if anonymous posting is still somehow being considered? I feel the need to register to participate can be a big blocker to get engagement in a community. Any view on best practices around this in the wider community field?

Hi ​@Jef Vanlaer 👋,

This hasn’t made it to our roadmap unfortunately. There’s lots of downsides to enabling this in the wider community field. Here’s a few of the main reasons:

1. Increased workload for moderators on anonymous posts.
2. Missed relationship building. Hard to know the perspective / context of the user.
3. Loss of trust within the community.
4. Uneven engagement / playing field. It could discourage users that aren’t anonymous from posting.
5. Missed lead generation opportunities.

Curious to hear your perspective though. Theoretically users can still remain anonymous by simply using a username that does not give away their identity (whilst ensuring profile fields are not visible on the frontend). 

If it’s an option, SSO with auto-registration also reduces the registration barrier.

Hi ​@olimarrio 

I mostly agree on the downsides you mention, although the increased workload for moderators would be a trade-off the customer should make, if you ask me.

I am mainly looking for a solution to increase engagement in a world where privacy concerns constantly grow bigger. It’s not just about other community members seeing people’s names and knowing who they are, many people are already reluctant to leave their data on a registration form. There’s a big tendency on ungating content in the marketing world; why wouldn’t that hold for community engagement as well? If people can experience the benefits of engaging in the community in an anonymous way first, maybe they don’t mind leaving their details so much to get even more value in a later stage?

SSO with auto-registration would be great, but the combination of multiple deployment methods (on-premise to SaaS) with every customer having their own user management system makes this really hard. A thought that came up last week though: any chance this could be built based on the data we have in PX?