Allow posting without registering | Feature Requests

Allow posting without registering

Sweet Bandicoot

Could use IP to deduplicate votes

Beige Gerbil

Hopefully this will be reconsidered with the new pricing model

Sarah Hum

Hi Beige Gerbil, can you elaborate here on how you see new pricing impacting this?

Beige Gerbil

Sarah Hum: Hi Sarah - we'd assumed (it sounds like falsely) that this was not supported due to your old per contributor pricing. Unfortunately the lack of support for anonymous is stopping us from adopting Canny

Sarah Hum

Beige Gerbil: Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. We haven't built this out because we don't believe feedback is useful without know where it's coming from. Can you explain why you need your feedback to be anonymous?

Disturbed Peacock

Sarah Hum: To speak to this, our company takes customer privacy seriously. Even displaying a customer name is a breach of that privacy. Unfortunately we'll have to move away from Canny as well without this functionality.

Sarah Hum

Disturbed Peacock: Thanks for the note Matt. Sounds like this post might be a better solution for you. This way, at least you as the Canny admins, know who is behind the feedback.

Peach Sturgeon

Sarah Hum we have real issues with staff members using our platform accidentally logging into canny under the same account if they share a computer. It really confuses them and they think they’ll get in trouble for using their manager’s account etc. This would definitely help quite a bit

Sarah Hum

Peach Sturgeon: In that case, you wouldn't know who they are. Is that useful for you?

Peach Sturgeon

Sarah Hum: Well potentially they could have an option to leave a name/contact info/ 'identify yourself'/company name section for each post?

Sarah Hum

Peach Sturgeon: I see. That option is essentially registering for an account, which we do support. To be honest, this is the first time I've heard of issues around sharing a computer. We have yet to hear a compelling enough reason to support completely anonymous feedback. I would recommend telling your users to create separate accounts if they don't want to be using the same one.

Peach Sturgeon

Sarah Hum: Sure thing - understandable, I do see the value in getting them to sign up, so they can be contacted RE updates. We've only had it from 2 clients - we work in a sector where our users aren't often very tech savvy hence why this can happen! I think the biggest thing they really need is a link back to our site, as they get stuck once on canny and struggle finding their way back. (posted on another thread)

Scared Reindeer

I have some experience with this recently. I find that asking a user to add an account, and having that friction helps to focus the feedback. It offers just a large enough speed bump.
It also has the added benefit of identifying trolls who want to use your site to anonymously give a lot of unwarranted negative feedback, and use strong unprofessional language. 
When you put your name behind a post, you avoid the hiding behind the mask of anonymity.
That doesn't preclude it being useful as on option, because there are certainly a few use cases where anonymity is beneficial.

Sarah Hum

Merged in a post:

Anonymous feedback

Anxious Cardinal

Would be great if people don't have to login to vote and leave ideas

Independent Cricket

cookie, email (user entered), or sessionid could all work

Cyan Flamingo

It makes me wonder for app or website like Kllect that already has login feature, will the user flow confuses users. Imagine a user has first to log in my app, then when the user gives feedback he/she has to log in another platform.

Sarah Hum

Cyan Flamingo: We have single sign-on so your users won't have to log in to Canny. Go to your board and look under widgets to see how to set this up.

Green Cow

There's no doubt that it is useful to get the info on who's posting & voting, but some people may feel the friction of having to create an account is going to put off a lot of potential posters.

I'd certainly like to be able to offer the option of anonymous posting, but selling "create an account" to users with the promise of follow-ups when their idea gets bumped up the roadmap etc.

Andrew Rasmussen

Green Cow: Hey Simon, thanks for weighing in. 😊
It's also worth noting that if you hook up single sign-on then your users will be able to post & vote using their existing account with your service (rather than a new Canny account).
That being said, we hear this one pretty often. I expect we'll add an option so that teams can let their users vote anonymously. This will come with some amount of fraudulent votes (people voting many times on the same post) so we'd probably also want to provide a filter that shows the data without anonymous votes.

Andrew Rasmussen

Another post about this was made which had some interesting discussion in the comments: https://feedback.canny.io/admin/board/integrations/p/allow-anyone-to-give-feedback

Sarah Hum

Hey Sweet Bandicoot, for now, we want to focus on teams who care about who exactly posted/voted on feedback. Here's a brief article outlining why we think this is helpful: https://help.canny.io/faq/why-should-i-authenticate-my-users-to-give-feedback.

We'll definitely keep this open and revisit if it gets more traction. Thanks for posting!

Amaranth Puma

Sarah Hum: we care about who posted, but can we allow people to just give their name and email without requiring them to sign-up? You can refer to UserVoice how they implement this feature.

People should be able to do the following by just leaving an email address:

Up vote.
Comment.
Create new requests.

In our pilot run the major feedback we get from our users is that they don't like signing up for yet another service. This became the biggest obstacle for our adoption.

We are a mobile app, SSO wouldn't work.

Sarah Hum

Hi Amaranth Puma, do your users not have user accounts in your app? If you've installed our mobile widget, you should be able to use SSO.