UserVoice Blog

Interesting thing happened today.  We’ve been putting together an option for turning off anonymous feedback. It was nearly ready until…  the perfect storm brewed!

Allegedly, there was a discussion about social media & feedback at the Fuel Conference last week.  One of the responsible party members, Ryan Carson of Carsonified, was nice enough to have mentioned UserVoice.

Yesterday he announced they had set up a page for their upcoming Future of Web Design conference in New York. The announcement generated a fair amount of traffic, however not all of the traffic was helpful. A number of anonymous types left some rather unusual posts - which prompted a conversation about anonymous posting.

In some cases, having anonymous posts can be healthy, good and productive.  In other cases, there may be an excuse to be silly and generally unhelpful.

Yesterday’s experience with the FoWD page showed what happens when silliness gets out of hand. Ryan & company had sincere efforts for gathering feedback for potential speakers - but a few readers took advantage.  So after hearing his concern - we rolled out a fix ahead of schedule.

If you are an account owner on UserVoice, sign in and click on “Manage Account“ in the upper right hand corner of your UserVoice page.

You’ll see it now says, “Allow Anonymous Feedback?” on the right-hand sidebar. It says “true” by default - but, if you are an account owner, you can click this link and select, “false” which will prevent all further anonymous feedback.

So again - thanks go out to Ryan Carson for utilizing UserVoice and also for pushing the agenda to make anonymous users optional. There was also a request that prompted the original consideration of this feature by our user redrum - so we also want to thank redrum for contributing the initial idea.