I want external users to be able to comment on our public Confluence articles

[Charles Frankston]

But not do so anonymously.

We have a large user community -- hundreds of thousands. We're about to embark on a major development project, for which I want to invite community feedback. The commenting feature on Confluence pages would be a good way to do this, but we don't have the bandwidth, or funds to manually register everyone who might want to provide us with feedback.

Jira Service Desk has the concept of "Customers", as opposed to users. A customer can self-register -- even using an OAuth identity, which is perfect, and then post requests. If there were a setting in Confluence to allow our Service Desk customers to comment on articles, this would be a good fit for our use case.

We can't use anonymous for several reasons:

• We need to know who the commenters are, in case we have to ban them (yes, they could likely create new accounts and come back, but that's a lot more trouble for the bad actor).
• We want the commenters to know who is making a comment. Most of our commenters will be active researchers in some area of science, and the community members will usually know each other. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Charles Frankston 

Welcome to the community.

Have you contacted Atlassian directly about this? It is an interesting idea, and I wonder if anybody has raised it with them. If not, you should!!