anonymizing the submission queue
By Whizard , Section Wishlist [] Posted on Mon Jan 08, 2001 at 12:00:00 PM PST
A while back, I posted a comment in a story thread on K5 with this idea, and it got rated relatively highly, but not much discussion was made on the topic, and the recent issues with the "Anne Marie" story posts have made me wonder about it more. Essentially, what if stories were anonymous until they made it out of the submission queue. Read on for implementation ideas...

First off, I'm sure many former and current /.-ers are going to jump on this idea screaming "Noooooo... Anonymity is eeeee-vil!" However, to assuage the fears of those who react that way, I want to make it clear that this isn't true anonymity, but more an encouragement to vote on stories on the basis of the story and its content, rather than the politics of who posted it. Some may not see this as a problem, and it may not be yet, but this comment (which is on a story still in the moderation queue) was what inspired me to revisit the idea. Now, for the details. Essentially, what I'm thinking is that all stories in the moderation queue should have the name of the Author hidden, until such time when the story makes it out of the queue and into a section or the front page. Correspondingly, the author of the story should have the ability to post as "Author" to the comments of the story while it's still in the moderation queue, and as soon as the story exits the moderation queue, those comments will likewise revert to the user's real username. This provides a suitable level of anonymity to other readers, preventing people from basing their votes on who posted it, rather than what's being posted, but still allows the admins to handle issues with stories/users correctly. This seems like it should be pretty straightforward to implement, though I say that without having looked at the code to Scoop. If this is something that people are interested in seeing, however, I will be glad to grab the code and see about adding it as a feature, unless some of the other code maintainers are interested in doing so.

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Anonymous submissions? · No thanks. 25% · 2 lumps, please! 75% Votes: 4 Results | Other Polls

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