Posting without registration but with a custom name

Started by phobos_research, March 14, 2013, 08:45:23 AM

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phobos_research

Hello,

I'm currently evaluating different forum packages for use in an intranet environment. I have the following rather uncommon requirement:
Intranet users (ie. employees) should be able to post to the forum without the need to register first, but should be able to leave their name with their post. That is, we don't want every post to have "Guest" or similar as the author's name.

Is this possible with SMF?

Regards,
Andre

青山 素子

Yes, this is possible. I'm currently doing this on one site I manage.
Motoko-chan
Director, Simple Machines

Note: Unless otherwise stated, my posts are not representative of any official position or opinion of Simple Machines.


MrPhil

Are they asked to fill in their name each time they post, or is there some sort of "lightweight" registration? Without a formal registration, I would be concerned that an employee could post something malicious and attribute it to another employee: "Our CEO is a stupid doody-head, signed /Andre/". Is your concern that another ID and password would be too much burden on employees, and they wouldn't bother to post if they had to remember such and log in each time? Perhaps a corporate ID and password (clear text version) could be transferred in to SMF in some fashion, so employees don't have to remember and maintain another ID and password? They'd still have to log in, but wouldn't have to remember additional things. Some people have "merged" SMF's ID and password with other web-based applications' IDs and passwords, so maybe it could be done. The big concern would be getting a clear text version of the other account's password so that it could be fed to SMF, especially if it's located on a different system (different site, or non-web).

青山 素子

Quote from: MrPhil on March 14, 2013, 11:11:14 AM
Are they asked to fill in their name each time they post, or is there some sort of "lightweight" registration?

Not sure who you are asking, but I'll answer for how I have it set up. In my case, I'm using it as a "comment" feature for posts in a "news" board. I disabled SMF's requirement of asking for an e-mail address. The post box simply asks for a display name and the post contents.


Quote from: MrPhil on March 14, 2013, 11:11:14 AM
Without a formal registration, I would be concerned that an employee could post something malicious and attribute it to another employee: "Our CEO is a stupid doody-head, signed /Andre/".

In my case, the posts show up as guest posts, not registered accounts.


Quote from: MrPhil on March 14, 2013, 11:11:14 AM
The big concern would be getting a clear text version of the other account's password so that it could be fed to SMF, especially if it's located on a different system (different site, or non-web).

You wouldn't necessarily have to do that. You could write a sign-in bridge that sets up an SMF session for a user record. The only thing you'd need to transfer across would be the usernames. Depending on how an external authentication process is designed, that could be simple or complex to do.
Motoko-chan
Director, Simple Machines

Note: Unless otherwise stated, my posts are not representative of any official position or opinion of Simple Machines.


Kindred

If its an internal network, it's probably using Windows/LDAP

http://www.davidschultz.org/blog/2008/4/10/how-to-authenticate-against-active-directory-using-php.html
that post may be useful in creating a function which validates an SMF login against the Active Directory record...

no guest posting needed....  Set up user accounts and then the user is automatically associated into SMF by their AD login\



Edit- there was actually an LDAP mod built for 1.1.x which got rejected (because, at the time, we did not allow or support third party mods like that here on the official site). However, it looks like it worked...    and, if someone was to do one for 2.0.x, I think we would probably encourage it to be submitted...
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