Hide name when posting on Discussion Board

Question

Hi,

I want to allow my MOSS 2007 portal users to post threads on one of my Discussion Boards anonymously. Note this is not the same as accessing the Discussion Board anonymously. The people who view or post to the Discussion Board must belong to my 'Portal Members' group. It's just that they should not be identifiable by their posting, either by other members or administrators. Is this possible in MOSS 2007?

Answer 1

Have you tried to control this via views or locking it down by changing the owner to another person (ie not admin or farm ID) and then protect that with views by taking out posted by, modified by?  The problem in an enterprise is that comment and its' actions tie back to the AD GUID (unique ID for user in domain).   So just trying to take it out could brake basic funtionality...

Kris

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Kris Wagner, MCITP, MCTS Twitter @sharepointkris Blog: http://sharepointkris.com

Answer 2

Kris,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've changed the view so that it does not display the Created and Modified fields. But users can still click on the View Properties link and they will see on the footer the Created By and Modified By users. Is there a way I can hide the View Properties link and disable access to the View Properties page?

I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean by "locking it down by changing the owner to another person (ie not admin or farm ID)".

It's ok (but not ideal) if Administrators are able to see who created or modified the post, but normal members and moderators should not be able to see that.

Answer 3

Sorry correction to my previous post. We need a completely anonymous forum, such that even portal administrators, system admins and database admins cannot find out who said what. Is there such a thing in SharePoint? I'm sure there's a demand for this among companies.

Answer 4

Hi Kris and others,

Does anyone have an answer to my question? Thanks.

Answer 5

have you looked at the http://www.codeplex.com/CKS maybe it helps with your problem.

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Check my website http://www.kbworks.nl or follow me on @KbWorks

Answer 6

Paul,

THanks for the link. However I can't find where CKS provides anonymous forums. I do not wish to create a community site, as I already have my own MOSS portal. I'm just looking for an out of box feature in MOSS to provide anonymous forums. Is there nothing like this in MOSS?

Answer 7

Give me tomorrow to look it over... hit me up at @sharePointkris and we'll see if we can look at it. ... Sound good?

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Kris Wagner, MCITP, MCTS Twitter @sharepointkris Blog: http://sharepointkris.com

Answer 8

Hi,

You can do this pretty easily using API code. For example:-

            using (SPSite s = new SPSite("http://urltosite"))
            {
                using (SPWeb w = s.OpenWeb())
                {
                    w.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
                    SPList discussionBoard = w.Lists["discussionboardname"];
                    discussionBoard.ShowUser = false;
                    discussionBoard.Update();
                }
            }

I should point out that the user names are still stored in the database, so if you reverse the process, (ie discussionBoard.ShowUser = true, then the names will be exposed.

Paul

Answer 9

Hi Paul,

Thanks. Yours looks like a solution. But pardon my ignorance...where is this API code found?

Answer 10

Hi,

No problem... what you will need is a developer with Visual Studio. They will be able to create a simple program that runs the above code to modify the discussion board list.

In a nutshell, the API is contained in a set of .dll files that is installed on your server when you install SharePoint. Basically it is the code that makes SharePoint work. Software developers can "tap in" to this code to extend the functionality of the existing code.

Paul.