I spent a couple of days reading the documentation for the new releases and found a few gems. One of those is found in the Enhancing Membership Roadmap. A new feature to add the ability to provide a Demo user is described and will probably be the way to allow the Forum and anyother module that needs to use it in similar ways, to allow anonymous usage of some functionality.

This has not been implemented yet though. To read about it, look at page 30 of the mentioned document, available in the Documentation zip for the newest versions.

Hi Ken,

My stance is not against making this an option. My stance is against me spending what very little free time I have making it happen when I see 20 other things that take priority over it. I receive plenty of IM's, emails and other forms of communication which still don't add up to the 20% use case and this definately keeps pushing the need for this anonymous posting enhancement down with each new item I see as a problem/bug. To be clear, again, this isn't me saying "I am totally against this and it will never happen" its me simply saying I don't have the time to tackle this because its not high on the priority list based on community feedback. The things that I spend my time on are what is high on the priority list based on community feedback.

As for the forums module participation, I would say that in the last 7 months there has been less than 10 code checkins that were not me. (Well, add another 5-10 for Shaun W as he pioneered two enhancements). If you follow this module that should give you some idea of how much I work on this. I do not want to take anything away from my team here as I too really understand how important freetime is and how very little of it most of us have. I also take blame that I don't do much aside from emails going out to manage the project better than I currently do. The time I spend on the project varies depending on my work load, the books I am writing, my core commitments, how much time I spend on gallery and how long it has been since I released a version. Over the past few weeks I have spent about 5 hours a week on the module but in the past have spent as much as 30 and as little as none. In addition to that, I tend to spend about 2-4 hours a week consistently supporting the module via these forums, IM and visiting other sites to help as well. (I have been traveling for work and trying to crank out the Dummies book so support has been down the past month or so, but I have released 3 versions of the module in that time).

My main goal right now is to stabalize the current release a bit more and shift focus to gallery for a bit, this also is a factor in the anonymous posting support. That said, I am not oppossed to outside support but there are certain criterium (such as the ability to enable/disable this feature) that I would require. I am not requiring it to be a ball buster, but to make sure the project as a whole moves forward in positive way.  I do want to add that Will makes a great module w/ Active Forums but I have never looked at his code and only used it as a user. This module was never made to compete with commercial products but I do understand that it does. I personally will never use Active Forums, not because it is a bad product but because basically this is 'my code' if you know what I mean. Between that and us using it here, this module will continue to move forward and will hopefully be the premiere forum module for DotNetNuke.

I am not posting this to encourage people to like me, I am doing so with the hope that they will understand the walls I face on a daily/weekly basis with this module. I also wanted to say I hope only the best for your daughter and I hope she is on a speedy path to recovery.

Thanks for listening,

Chris P.