As of today we have enabled a Discourse features that allows users to “Enter Anonymous Mode”. Click on your avatar at the top-right, go to the preferences tab, and you should see the option there.
While in anonymous mode any post you make will show up as being made by “anonymous<number>” .
More info about this feature: Enable and configure anonymous mode - #4 - admins - Discourse Meta
This is prompted by the discussion about Building a community for Sustainability-oriented Clojure work
In general we hope this change will allow critical discussion. Obviously our Code of Conduct still applies to all posts, anonymous or not.
I’m making this change as an executive decision, because I don’t think a long discussion here is going to fruitful. Obviously there is potential negative impact, people might abuse this feature to misbehave. But we need to see if that happens in practice. If so we can see if we can mitigate that, or if we reconsider this change.
Note that this feature is only available to people with a certain trust level. Trust levels are a discourse feature where users gradually level up by interacting on the forum. They range from 0 to 3. This means that only people who have been members for some time, and are aware of how this community works, can post anonymously.
The default is to enable it for trust level 1. I have currently set it to 2, but that’s already quite high, so I may drop it back down to 1.
