An interesting problem I came across recently was how to set up a WordPress blog with an anonymous user. Now, a simple way would be to create a brand new user with fake information, but that’s too easy.
After looking for some prior art, I found the Anonymizer plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repository. Unfortunately, it’s not been updated in ten years! It doesn’t work well with modern WordPress–but I had this as a base to work with.
After doing a lot of testing, I came up with this solution:
This plugin adds a few more options in the user profile screen to add additional meta that will be displayed instead of the standard information.
Now, this is more of a toy or a proof of concept than an actual safe anonymous source. Plugins and themes can still gather user information through other means, including directly querying the database.
The only thing I’ve not tested yet is querying users via XML-RPC.
Leave a Reply