Is it possible to allow anonymous contributions to Confluence without sacrificing access control?

[Robin Fernandes]

I would like to enable users to make contributions to a Confluence instance without their name being associated with those contributions in the edit history etc... I have seen the doc on anonymous access. This seems to be a kind of "guest" access, by which users are no longer required to log in to contribute - this isn't quite what I'm after.

Is it possible to allow anonymous contributions without sacrificing access control?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

No. here's a very black-and-white fact here - either you need no control (allow anonymous access, and for heaven's sake, do not allow access to Confluence outside your organisation), or you do need control. If you do need control, then you have to know who the users are, which means some form of login. There's no in-between I can work out.

There are work-arounds - have an account called "the user with no name" and give the password to people who need it. Or customise the code to hide the display of certain (or all) names. But there's no getting away from the fact that you need to know someone's identity if you need to control users.

[Robin Fernandes]

Makes sense. I was thinking, for example, of a case in which you want to collect anonymous feedback on a page, or an anonymous poll, etc...  In those cases, you might want to be confident that the user is authenticated, but not want be able to easily associate them with their contributions within a specific page / space. Thanks for the workaround ideas.