03 March 2020, 22:53

13 April 2020, 21:24

Hi Rob,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I suspect that when this feature was developed, journals were not considered as they usually imply that a person needs to be known. Admin and staff can always click the 'Anonymous' and see the full name. Therefore, it is more for outward facing / public portfolios where it can be of interest.

I can see the point that some may wish to anonymise journal entries as well. Then it would need to cascade also to files when viewing the metadata on a page and other elements. So it could be quite a bit deal depending on how the anonymising functionality was implemented on the page level.

For what did you want to use the page anonymisation?

Thanks

Kristina

12 September 2025, 22:02

Kia ora Kristina and All,

I've been trawling through the forums and can't find any later posts specifically about the issue of making journal posts anonymous, so thought I would check-in to see if there have been any further developments.

I noted that work was done on a patch to address some anonymity issues (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/548021) but I haven't had full site admin rights for some time so don't know if anything was ever implemented in core that just needs to be switched on, or if the solution is something that needs to be installed as an institutional decision (our IT have a policy of not editing core code or installing non-core patches).

I've been trying to work with one of our programme teams to implement using Mahara journals with their students. They specifically want to keep the timestamps to see when a post was written, but not display the student name, as they insist they need to assess the work anonymously. I've made the case that anonymity isn't generally considered a requirement for personal reflections (arguably knowing who wrote them is actually important), but this is a show-stopper for the academic team. Changing the display name at the top of the page is easy enough (so we just display an ID), but every individual post pulled through from the journal displays the user name, which isn't what staff want.

I could just create a template page with a batch of empty text boxes so students can simply edit the textbox instead of writing a journal post - but that won't include the timestamp (unless I can figure out some clever way of pulling in last-edited-date to the textbox by default), and also misses the simplicity of just clicking on the 'add post' button and the practice of developing a reflective journal that can be curated with keywords etc over a period of time.

Ideally if the portfolio page is being submitted to a Moodle assignment (which makes marking and feedback delightfully simple for everyone) it should automatically obfuscate identity in the submitted work if the Moodle assignment is configured with anonymous submissions set to yes, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I appreciate the technical requirements aren't that simple, but it would be nice if it was automated in the background.

Any update on what is possible (or alternative workarounds) would be most welcome.