How to allow non-members to add non-anonymous comments

• allow anonymous comments by a) granting the Reply to item permission to the Anonymous role in the ZMI. (Do this for the plone instance to enable sitewide discussion) and b) activating the Allow Discussion checkbox in the portal_types entry of (at least) Document.
• Add a name field to 'discussion_reply_form':

                  <div class="field">
  
                      <label for="username" i18n:translate="label_name">Name</label>
  
                      <input name="Creator"
                             id="username"
                             value="" alt="Submitter" title="Name"
                             size="40"
                             tabindex=""
                             i18n:attributes="title"
                             tal:attributes="tabindex tabindex/next;" />
  
                  </div>
  

• Make the corresponding discussion_reply script use this, but only, if the user is not logged in, and if the field hasn't been left empty. This has the added benefit, that users who chose to leave the field empty will (correctly) be shown as 'anonymous':

    if not Creator:
     creator = context.portal_membership.getAuthenticatedMember().getUserName()
    else:
     creator = Creator
    id = context.createReply(title=title, text=text, Creator=creator)
  

You can download the entire scripts for your convenience: discussion_reply_form and discussion_reply.

(credits to James Cameron Cooper and Jon Stahl from the plone-user mailing list)

Jon:

  I have figured out how to enable anonymous (unregistered) users to comment on
items in Plone 2.0, but I'm wondering if there's an easy way to allow anonymous
commenters to submit their name so that anonymous comments are shown as being
from  <name> rather than from "anonymous."

  I've already tried changing the "Creator" input item in the
discussion_reply_form from hidden to visible.  That allowed me to change the
default "Anonymous User" value in the discussion form, but the posted comment
still displayed as from "anonymous" after it was submitted, no matter what I
entered as my name.

James:

  Although the form defines that input, the script it submits to (discussion_reply) doesn't
  honor it, or even pay attention.

  You can customize that script to fix this by doing the following:

 - add to the parameters 'Creator=None' 

 - replace this line:

 creator = context.portal_membership.getAuthenticatedMember().getUserName()

 with 

  if not Creator: creator = context.portal_membership.getAuthenticatedMember().\
    getUserName() 
  else: creator = Creator

  There are slightly more efficient variants, but this gets the job done with the 
  least amount of changes.