Anonymous User - Prolific poster!

Whodathunkit · Post by **Whodathunkit** » Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:15 pm

Been on a mission to clean up the 'back end' of our almost two decades old Board, with help from the great gurus here!

Cleaned out INACTIVE USERS who never logged on, no posts (1000's, and 99.9 percent of those were spammers). Q&A Captcha is now set up based on recommendations here, and we have a custom profile requirement to help ensure genuine interest in our Board topic. Also dumped years of orphaned attachments, no way to easily determine if they were supposed to be linked to any particular post.

Then there's the required Anonymous User, which seems to be (based on reading here) required for Guest Users to be able to read the forums? However in checking under User Admin on ACP, and selecting Anonymous User, there are over 52,000 posts associate with that account? The posts date from April 2004 to Feb 2011, and the "by..." info includes the names of valid registered users? Do you think this was some configuration issue with a previous setup of our Board? Not sure how Anonymous ended up with so many posts associated with that account, as there are no current posts for that user (since 2011). Should this just be ignored as a past anomaly or is some clean-up needed? Kinda leaning toward 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it!' but would like to know some guesses as to why this happened so documentation for administering our Board can include specific instructions regarding avoiding this for the future. Anonymous User is the only entry in Guest group. and has "no" for everything in POST, PROFILE, MISC and PRIVATE MESSAGES. Anything else to know/do?

Many thanks, gracias, merci, etc.

Post by **Brf** » Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:24 pm

Posts can be made by the Anonymous user if you allow the Guest group posting permissions. Also, if you delete a user, leaving their posts, they get assigned to the Anonymous user.

Post by **stevemaury** » Sat Jan 09, 2021 3:44 pm

Whodathunkit wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:15 pm Anonymous User is the only entry in Guest group. and has "no" for everything in POST, PROFILE, MISC and PRIVATE MESSAGES. Anything else to know/do?

You are looking at Group permissions. To block Guest posting, you need to look at Group forum permissions. You probably want to assign the Guests group a Read only Permission role for all forums.

Whodathunkit · Post by **Whodathunkit** » Mon Jan 11, 2021 7:02 pm

Many thanks for the info.

I've looked at GROUP FORUM permissions and the default READY ONLY ACCESS settings. Assuming we want to encourage "guests" to sign up and be members of our Board, should READ ONLY ACCESS be changed to only allow CAN SEE FORUM, CAN SEE TOPICS and CAN READ FORUM? Seems like guests shouldn't be able to search, print, download or subscribe to our forums unless they become members? Otherwise hundreds of lurkers who never sign up and join unless they decide they want to post?

Post by **Mick** » Tue Jan 12, 2021 9:20 am

The problem with that is if you deny everything to a guest they won’t know what the boards about and may well go elsewhere. Generally content gets guests signing up not stopping them seeing anything.

Post by **stevemaury** » Tue Jan 12, 2021 4:31 pm

Well the ability to search is a permission setting. If you can see something, it is already downloaded and can be printed. And screenshot. So what do you want to show to Guests, and what don't you?

Whodathunkit · Post by **Whodathunkit** » Tue Jan 12, 2021 8:36 pm

Thought would be to encourage people to sign up as members vs. lurk, possibly restricting some viewing and features to encourage sign up for full features. As it stands, the only "benefit" to joining hinges on being able to post? The Board's been around for many years so it ain't a make-or-break, simply hoping to entice people to participate in a non-FB/Instagram/Twitter/etc. environ again