Ability to submit a community post without having to log in

Update added to this comment 5/24/19: 

Development has resumed on the Communities platform. Users interested in this functionality should up vote the original post and share details regarding why they desire this functionality and how they would use it in the comments below.

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Hey Robert - 

The Communities platform does require authentication in order for users to post; that is not a change-able setting. There are no plans to develop any additional features or functionality for the platform, though I encourage you to continue sharing your feedback in case it is ever picked back up by the product team. 

Hey Nicole, 

> There are no plans to develop any additional features or functionality for the platform

Why that? :-(

Wish I could tell you, Robert. My understanding is basically that some business analysts and product development teams evaluated things and decided that other products/product areas are higher priorities. 

Alright, let's leave as is then. Thanks!

You're welcome. Sorry I don't have more exciting news on that front. 

No worries. Will hack around it. :-)

haha, alright. If you get it to work well, you should share the process as a tip in our Tips & Tricks section. 

Will do. :-)

Hi Robert! We're wondering the same thing at my company, having the ability to post in the Community without being logged in. Wondering if you were able to "hack" around it? Thank you!

Hey Kelsey + others,

I am interested in knowing the specific use case for why it is useful to have non-signed in users post to the community. Is this something you want to share more about here in the community? Potentially we could also connect through email or a call if you want to talk more about it in depth.

We are releasing a feature very soon related to this, end-user alias. This will allow end-users to add an alias name to their account and thereby avoiding to expose their real name in the community. Is this at all relevant to you?

Appreciate the feedback. 

We are interested in this feature as well. This is essentially the same as a guest checkout vs. logged in customers. If the customer is not familiar with the product or service, they may be hesitant to give all their information away with the fear of being spammed. One is more likely to interact if they do not have to "sign-up" especially if they have a simple question and want to remain anonymous. 

With our industry, our customers or leads like to do their homework. We would like to make it as easy as possible to answer as many qualifying questions as possible in a free and open environment without the fear of being bombarded with sales emails, promotions, etc. from either us or Zendesk. 

We have received a few "complaints" from leads saying they had questions about a help center question and didn't feel comfortable signing in.  

Oscar Junker

I'm very interested in allowing non-signed users to post in our communities. Will be happy to get on a call or email with more details. 

We're also really interested in allowing users to create & contribute to community topics anonymously.

My understanding is that this isn't currently possible as users need to have a zd account & be logged in, which won't happen for the majority of our customers - I imagine for a similar reason to what Jessica suggested.

Users can vote anonymously but can't contribute content which would limit our ability to capture user stories & improve our products & services.

If this could be improved, we wouldn't have to begin the search for a clunky forum platform!

I'd also be interested in a call to discuss.

We would like the ability for users to be able to submit a post anonymously. Our use case:

We are an online school and use our Zendesk Help Guide as a community space for our students to share resources, make feature requests, give feedback, etc. We also ask our students to give feedback through and Airtable form, because they can do so anonymously there. We'd love to consolidate our feedback from students to be able to have 1 source of truth for all of our information, but we don't want to lose out on the feedback we get from students anonymously. So, we don't want this to be a non-signed in user, but just a checkbox where a user can say they'd like to post their message anonymously and then their name is masked.

It's very important for our school image that we build a sense of trust and transparency around the feedback we are getting and addressing it openly, but we can't do that if our students don't feel comfortable giving us the feedback to begin with.

Hello @...

So one solution that might work for you is enabling aliases for users within your community. This would let people be able to post with our revealing who the original poster was. I've shared a link below that goes into this process in further detail.

Enabling aliases for users in Help Center

Best regards. 

We also want the ability to leave anonymous comments on an article from people without a Zendesk account.

We have only one article in our Help Center open for comments: an "Ideas" article. This is a place to get product feedback. We ask people to suggest new features and vote on other's ideas.

Enabling aliases is not a solution to our situation. Our problem is that the barrier to entry of requiring them to make a Zendesk account in order to leave an idea is too high, so an alias account has the same height of barrier.

Connecting Zendesk profiles and our platform's user profiles is not a solution either. We prioritize privacy for our users and I have confirmed with Zendesk support that if one of our users asks to delete their profile on our platform and they have a connected profile on Zendesk, their deletion request would not delete their Zendesk profile at the same time. So that's a non-starter for us.

Also, we don't care about the risk of negative or irrelevant comments from anonymous people commenting. We have the content moderation queue enabled and we don't mind monitoring that to make sure only real ideas are posted.

@... : we have the exact same use case as @....

That is, we need our customers to be able to just whiz in and leave us feedback without going over the hurdle of creating an account. Sure, a CAPTCHA would be great, but let people just create comments.

While waiting for ZenDesk to bring out this feature, we have to do clunky work-arounds like use other products such as public Google forms and whatnot.

Please help this become a reality for the great number of people who have been requesting this feature.

+1 We also would like our users to leave feedback without having to sign-in

Hi everyone, 

Thank you for the feedback and your use cases. Unfortunately, it is not on our roadmap to allow anonymous posting.  

Hello, we also would like to add feedback to the request to remove the roadblock of users being required to create an account and sign in to post and comment in our community (Gather). We've discovered that many customers are confused by the difference between logging into our ATS product and logging into Zendesk which they don't associate with our company. 

Hi Jessica,

It's not going to happen.  Despite many Zendesk users demanding this option, they've decided that on our behalf it's not important.

How frustrating (yes, Zendesk, I know you sympathize with my frustration, no need to mention it).  The thing would be just to break down and finally implement this feature that people have been clamouring about for over five years.

Jamie