anonymous users can't like/react to a page
Asked by Lucien Kress:

I want anonymous users to be able to like/react to a page. Currently, if an anonymous user hovers on the like button, it shows "loading" but never becomes clickable. This behavior in both Chrome and Firefox. The Likes/Reactions setting is enabled, and logged-in users can like pages as expected. Any advice?


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: There's no way to do this without making like/react/vote utterly useless.

Imagine this really simple case:

* Alice looks at a page, logs in, and clicks like.
  * You record Alice liked the page
* Bob looks at a page, and clicks like.
  * You don't know who Bob is because they are anonymous, but heck, yes, record that Anonymous liked the page
* Charlie looks at a page, and clicks like.
  * Um. Charlie is anonymous, and the anonymous account has already liked it
  * Your choices for Charlie's "like" are:
  * Ignore it because anonymous already liked it. The like is useless.
  * Record it because it was a different time. What's to stop Charlie now liking it another 50,000 times before you notice Charlie is a spam-bot or troll?

Anonymous voting can't work.

comments: author: Lucien Kress
body: I suppose it depends on what you're using likes for. Is voting the only use case?


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Nope, there are plenty of other use cases, but the basic logic is still that if you want any form of rating or voting to be useful and not abused, you need to be able to count votes by some unique identifier.

This is something which you can not get from an anonymous source.


author: Lucien Kress
body: Understood. My use case is different, so I'm still looking for technical answer.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: The technical answer starts with "how do you uniquely identify a vote"?

You will need to answer that before you can move on to the next step.


author: Lucien Kress
body: Lol. I'm not looking for votes. You introduced that concept here. As my question stated, I want anonymous users to be able to like/react to a page. A successful answer will either explain how to enable that or explain why it can't (not shouldn't) be done.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Ok, so how do you uniquely identify a like or a reaction?

I have talked about "vote" simply because it's the same problem, and it's one that is better understood (and legislated for). If you want ratings, reactions, or votes to be useful, you need to be able to say "one person, one vote".

Or one person, one rating.

You are looking for votes, they just have a different name and usage.   

Like, vote, rate, and all the others - you do not want your people gaming it. (FWIW, one API token, and a seven-line script can totally mess up Rally's vote/like/react system, albeit 2 years ago and I really hope they've fixed it now)


author: Natascha Hartendorf
body: Why the vote bar on an anonymous space if it doesn't work there. Than there must be an option to disable it.

It's a bit useless that there's a vote bar but it's not working.


author: Craig Nodwell
body: Hi [@Lucien Kress](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5115440) welcome to the community. I may be off here but my understanding is liking a page requires write access. Anonymous users do not have write access.

comments: author: Lucien Kress
body: Interesting. Do you have a reference for that? I've confirmed that anonymous users can comment on a page, and I would imagine likes/reactions would require the same level of access.


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud