The Anonymous Publishing CL module is part of the Anonymous Publishing project.
It lets users publish content without first registering an account at the site, provided they supply a vaild email address and click on an activation link sent them in a verification email (some call this the “craigslist model”).
To access the Anonymous Publishing CL administration form, you need to be granted the right to administer anonymous publishing.
After installing and activating the module navigate to:
.There are seven tabs:
You first need to select the content type (or types) that you will allow anonymous users to post. You may also enable anonymous publishing for comments.
If you want to allow users that are not logged in to create content, you must also give permission for the anonymous user to create content. This is done by navigating to
.The rest of the settings on the settings page will only have an effect on the type or types (including comments) selected here.
Here is a brief description of the options:
The setting for verification persistency determines whether users need to re-verify after they've verified (or have been verified) once. The settings are:
The setting for the attribution or byline (“To whom should anonymous postings be attributed”) can only be used if the retention period (set on the Privacy tab) is set to “Indefinitely”. When accessible, it lets you choose between the following three options:
If you select option 1 (use some default alias) after having one of the options for a persistent alias active for some time, the aliases will no longer appear. They will, however reappear if you select option 2 or 3.
If you select option 2 (generated alias), it will only affect new anonymous publishers. email addresses already known by the system will retain its existing alias/byline association.
If you select option 3 (user sets byline), the field to define an byline will appear on the content creation form for anonymous publishers. If the email address given by the user already has an byline associated with it, the new byline will take presedence over the old for all anonymous postings unless the user leaves the field blank. If the email address given is unknown and the user leaves the field blank, an alias will be generated for the user.
NOTE: The privacy settings of this sub-module let the administrator purge the information that links email addresses to anonymously published content from the datebase after some pre-set retenion period or immediately. This will delete all information linking specific content to activation email addresses. After purging, the it will no longer be possible to use an alias as a byline. Purging is not reversible.
The last four settings are:
Remember to press “Save configuration” when done.
In this panel, there are four fields that let the administrator customize the email message sent to non-authenticated users when they create content. The first field is the subject, the rest of the fields may go in the body. Other settings determine what fields are used.
There is also two templates (subject and body) for the email sent to the administrator.
This panel shows all the comtent published anonymously that have been verified by email. It lets the administrator publish or unpublish.
The moderation workflow of anonymous publishing is tied to the option “Allow self-activation”. If you check this option, the user is allowed to selv-activate content by verifing his or her email address. If you leave this option unchecked, content created by unverified anonymous publishers will not become activated until it is approved by a moderator.
If you do not check the options “Allow selv-activation”, the content will not be published when the anonymous user verifies is or her email. In addition, the moderator must activate the content for it to be published.
This panels list all the verified emails and their current status.
Also listed is the alias associated with each email. The alias is always generated, but will only be shown publicly if you check “Associate a generated alias with contents published anonymously” under main settings.
Also listed is IP-address associated with each email. The IP-address listed will be used for blocking if you mark the email as blocked and you've checked “Use IP-address for blocking” under main settings.
email addresses that are blocked from anonymous publishing is shown with a check-mark in the column “blocked”.
To block, set a check-mark in the row of the email address. To unblock, remove this check-mark. To make changes take effect, press “Execute”.
Note that a checkmark in the “blocked” column will only prevent the user from posting anonymously. No other part of the site's functionality will be affected. Unlike the ban IP action you may take in the “Unverified” and “Spam” panels, the blocking is handled by this module, not by Drupal.
This status of blocked is only meant to be used to block abusive human users from publishing anonymously, not to ban spambots.
This panels list all the emails IP-addresses that has been associated with anonymous publishing that has not yet verified by email and how long it has remained unverified.
This panel provides a chortcut to admins that want to delete unpublished spams posts and at the same time ban the IP-address used to post it. Placing a mark in the “Select” column to the left of an posting listed here will select the posting for one og three actions:
{blocked_ips}
table. Banned IP-addresses will not have access to any part of site at all.To unban a banned IP address, navigate to:
and press “delete” for the IP-address you want to unblock.The spambots panel shows the IP-address of the “Top 10” spambots targeting the site, along with some simple statistics. You can ban an IP address by placing a check-mark in the “ban IP” column. When you press “Execute”, the IP-address will is moved to the list of IP-addresses blocked by Drupal.
To unban an IP address, follow the same procedure as suggested above.
While no email address or username is made avialable to outsiders, the email address and IP-address associated with content is by default retained indefinitely, and can be extracted from the database. If your site is used to publish sensitive material, you may want to limit the period the record that links emails and IP-addresses to specific content is retained.
For a very sensitive site, you may want to set this to “Delete ASAP” to delete at next cron run. But you may also opt to retain for a limited time (from an hour up to 1 month) to give you some time to pick up the email addresses or IP-addresses of spammers and block them. The purging of email adresses and IP-addresses is done by cron, so you need to run cron at least as often as half the maximum period set to be sure identifiers are purged within the time limit.
The button “Purge now” bypasses cron and purges the identifiers instantly.
If you want users that are not logged in to be able to create content, you also need to navigate to
and check the following for the anonymous user: “View published content”.Then for each of the content type(s) you want to allow anonymous publishing for, check the following for the Anonymous user: “Create new content”.
To allow the anonymous user to post comments, grant the following permissions:
To get rid of the “(Not verified)” string that appears next to the user name of any comment posted by the anonymous user, navigate to
and untick the following: “User verification status in comments”.The Anonymous Publishing CL module uses
Drupal's DefaultMailSystem
to send out
verification/activation emails (refer to the API documentation at
api.drupal.org for the function
“drupal_mail_system
”
for details). It uses the method “mail” to send the mail, and prints
out the message:
“A link and further instructions have been sent to your email address.”
after after the mail was successfully accepted for by the mail for delivery.
If the mail system rejects the message, it prints out:
“Error mailing activation/verification link.”
If you get the error message, then there is probably something wrong with the configuration of mail on your Drupal site.
Here are some things to check if you do not receive an email after posting as anonymous, despite the fact that you're told that a link and further instructions have been sent to your email address:
If the Schema module is enabled, you may get warnings saying: “no schema type for mysql type date”.
The reason for this warning is that this module uses
the date
datatype if it is supported by the database,
but date
is not a Drupal datatype. Since the
module is designed to use varchar
as a datatype for dates
if the database does not support date
, this should not be
a problem and you should ignore these warnings. You may turn these
warnings of by navigating to:
and ticking “Suppress schema warnings.”.
For more about this, see the comment linked to in the issue thread: “Schema module reporting some Date discrepancies” on Drupal.org.
If you allow anonymous publishing your site will probably be targeted by spammers, both of the human kind, and spambots. There is already some built-in protection against spambots in this module. These built-in features may be suffiscient to keep spam at bay. If you need more protection against spam, there are several spam control projects on Drupal.org that will help you do that.