Anonymity does violate one of the FundamentalPrinciples, but it may be acceptable so long as its the exception and not the rule. Naturally this type of function should be enabled/disabled by a server setting.

A proposal for anonymous discussions.

A discussion (public or private, unsure about moderated) could be created as anonymous. This would not be changable at any point in the future.

All messages sent to the anon discussion are displayed as being from some form of Discussion-user#. The messages should probably be sourced from the discussion itself for SLCP use, with the user identifier being an extra field.

Various functions are disabled or modified when dealing with anon discs so as to prevent obvious paths to exposing the user. Keeping their identity secret through their speech patterns is the responsibility of the user.

Cross-sends to an anon and a non-anon disc are disallowed.

Oops to/from an anon disc is disallowed.

Membership of anon discs is not visible.

Global public /ignore-s are not applied in anon discs (a user who is ignored by another user could reasonably guess when another person has them ignored when they only respond to one side of a conversation and thereby deduce their identity). Possibly ignores should be disallowed entirely in anon discs.

A user will never show up as being in an anon disc in /where

Users can send private messages to an anon id (Disc-user#), which would show up as being from their own anon-id. (maybe. This could be very useful to allow an anon discussion to go private or otherwise give a private way to reveal ones identity)

Users cannot be /fingered, /info-ed, or /memo-ed via an anon id.

-- JeffR - 14 Apr 2004

Clover was capable of rendering anyonymous discussions. I never implemented it when I managed the client because of lack of interest. I have no idea if someone else added support for it later, but I certainly do not recall seeing it actively used.

If this is worked on, be careful to ensure that all the pre-filtered data is strictly transient. I would avoid storing it into the review buffers, except in some kind of digested form. That being said, I do not find it in contravention of any of the lily principles because lily offered a similar type of functionality when the "consulting" system was in place. All of those transactions were mutually anonymous, capable of being abused, and yet provided out of a sense of higher value. Provided this were similarly well considered, it should be perfectly within the framework of lily's tennets.

-- ChristianRatliff - 15 Apr 2004

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