Guest mode for Anspress 4.x

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4

In the best case scenario everybody should register and be active part of growing community. It is just better for a q&a owner, but we all know, that the world does not work like that.

First of all anonymous user is just wrong name, it has a negative ring to it and nothing to do with anonymity. It is more like Guest posting, without all that registration crap. That way You can add one question (if You want to add just one), wait for answer and forget about it afterwords.

Now, as a Guest You don’t even receive mail about new answer to Your question, You cannot comment, up-vote or follow, to know if there is some activity etc.

There are many people who do not want to register and will give up from any contribution if they have no other way to participate.

So, I think, we need a better way for handling guest users.

  1. Guest comments.
  2. Voting (guest voting with some kind of IP and session/cookies protection to ensure no abuse).
  3. Following.
  4. Better handling of an guest adding questions and answers (name, mail, support for gravatars).
  5. Mail notifications for guest.
  6. Some simple moderation and antispam solution for guest.

Adding required mail field and gravatars is fairly simple, I done it in my Anspress 3.0.7. Same case with comments, as they are based on a WP Comment System. So maybe it is time to add this functions to the Anspress 4.x?