Remove email field from registration

[fullanonymity]

Hi guys,

I searched over and over and not found any solution about how to remove the email field from registration page, or turn it not required.

I have an anonymous private forum and I don't want to register any email in registrations to ensure that none user's sensible data will be grabbed in DB.

I know some people will say no agree with it, or will talk which is not viable, such does not interest me, I need a real solution to remove the email mandatory for registrations, so none user can enter their email address in the database never.  I'm sure it is possible and I believe that someone knows which files and which part of the code need to be changed to solve this.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Best regards.

[Arantor]

Well, I'm sorry but I'm just going to give you the bad news. So much of SMF's design requires an email address that it's simply not feasible to change it. While it's possible to deal with it in some ways (like not storing it in posts), some of the other issues (like if a user forgets their password) do make it virtually impossible to implement.

I'm not saying it's not possible, because it is, but it requires such a vast change to the software with so many side effects that speaking as a developer of SMF itself, I cannot recommend you attempt it.

[fullanonymity]

Thank you very much Arantor for clarify me and for fast reply.

I am newbie in SMF, I customized some parts of my forum but is highly critical to ensure not real email address be inserted by users, to guarantee their own anonymity.  If is not possible to remove it, is it possible to generate random addresses prefilled in email field?

Best regards.

[Arantor]

Still can't recommend it. You'd have to disable all the notification systems from users, and you'd have to hope none of them ever forgets their password because the only other way to reset it is not configured for users by default.

On the other hand, you could just enable guest posting, then use http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3592

But from registration, it's simply not practical.

And of course, an even more important rule: if it's online, it's traceable, no matter what you think you've done to prevent it from being so.

[fullanonymity]

I understand your opinion about and I respect your knowledge in SMF platform.

I am sure that anything online never will be safe, this is the rule, I know. But exists several ways to bypass and hard very much the reversal trackback, for this reason I am working under this last implementation, to turn strongly hard the reversal job against this forum.

I already disabled all user notifications and I have a simple way to recover lost passwords just creating a user and copying its hash in mysql tables directly, this really is not the problem to recover.

If I discover some solution I will share here if is possible.

Best regards.

[Arantor]

You could just do as I suggested which allows posting with more anonymity than what you have right now...

[fullanonymity]

It is a bit complex, I understand, but I will study something for this.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You can modify SMF to remove a new member's email address from the database when they activate their membership.  You can also prevent SMF from displaying or saving member IPs to database.  Yes, there are tradeoffs in functionality, but you can remove things that don't work (i.e., notifications), and inform your members accordingly in a sticky.

[JBlaze]

Or, you could just have them register a temporary email address at 10minutemail.com