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Path: Community Settings >> Community Configuration >> Community Info >> Anonymity
Anonymity tools are designed to enable moderators, judges, and reviewers to evaluate and moderate ideas and solutions impartially. They also allow members to participate openly—by commenting or submitting ideas—without hesitation, concern about retribution, or exposure to real or perceived discrimination based on age, gender, race, organizational role, or other potentially biasing factors.
In IdeaScale, three types of anonymity settings affect how activities appear to participants and moderators. Community administrators retain access to user data and identities within the application.
NOTE: When any type of anonymity is enabled, the username is displayed as “Community Member.”
Hide My Identity
This feature is enabled by Community administrators at the community level and hides participant profiles across all campaigns within a community.-
- Participants can choose to hide their own identity when enabled from Workspace Personal settings .
- Admins can choose to enable this feature to give all community participants the option to have a hidden identity.
It can be enabled from Community Settings >> Customization >> Customize Site Behavior. It gives the member control to choose if they want to hide their identity from Personal settings >> Your Communities >> More (3 dots) link >> Hide identity.
Note: Hide Identity option will only be available if it is enabled at the community level. If the option is not available, it means that it is not enabled.
It hides a member's avatar picture, first name, and last name from other users (email address is always hidden by default).
Disabling this feature will remove all members' ability within the community to hide their identities and reveal their names and avatars on all ideas, comments, votes, and community activities where they were previously hidden.
Force Community-Wide Anonymity
This setting grants Community administrators full control over community-wide anonymity. When enabled, it anonymizes all members across the community, and individual users cannot opt out of this setting as they can with the Hide My Identity option.
It can be enabled from Community Settings >> Customization >> Customize Site Behavior. Disabling the feature will reveal the members' names/avatars on all ideas, comments, votes, and community activities again.
Help Article on Hiding Your Identity/Anonymous Posts
Below are examples of what various parts of the application will look like when the member identity is hidden.
1. Submit Ideas: Idea submitter's name will be hidden.
2. Submit Comments: Commenter's name will be hidden.
3. Leaderboard: If members hide their identities, their names will not be seen on the Leaderboard. 
4. Campaign Sponsor: The owner name of the campaign will be hidden if the campaign owner hides the identity.
5. Moderate an Idea: Moderators can evaluate the Ideas anonymously.
6. Submit Vote: Members can submit votes anonymously in the ideas.
7. Refine Idea: Members can answer and edit the answer to refinement questions anonymously.
8. Join a team: Members can join an Idea team anonymously.
9. Fund an Idea: Members can contribute some funds anonymously to an Idea.
10. Assess idea: Members can assess anonymously in an Idea.
Submitting Anonymously
These are options set by Community admins at the community level and available to be switched on or off within campaigns.
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- Members can choose to submit their ideas or comments anonymously if the setting is available.
- Community admins can choose to Force Community-wide Anonymity.
Community admins can enable this option to allow members to submit anonymously on the campaign level from Community Settings >> Campaigns >> Edit campaign >> Basic Information >> Privacy & Access. It can be set up independently on individual campaigns, allowing the admin to set it as required.
It can be enabled for 2 actions:
1. Idea Submissions
2. Comments on Ideas
Once an idea is submitted anonymously, neither the idea owner nor anyone else can edit the idea to reveal the name of the idea submitter. However, if the "private idea submission" setting is turned off for that campaign, the submitter's name will be displayed. Such ideas and comments will also NOT be counted in the member's idea/comment statistics. The member's avatar picture, first name, and last name from other users (email address by default is always hidden) will be hidden.
Help article on Private ideas
Help article on Anonymous Ideas and Comment Submission