Let's face it, having to create an account is probably the number 1 reason that users avoid doing anything trivial on the web. By trivial, I mean things like commenting on blog entries, posting content, playing online games, etc.<\/p>\n
It just so happens that these are generally the type of things that could most benefit from allowing anonymous interaction.<\/p>\n
The challenge is tracking users, so they can maintain at least a minimal account-like status. For instance, if a user anonymously submits a comment to a blog post, they may want to later edit that comment. But, there's no way to allow this without tracking the user in some way.<\/p>\n
The most obvious way to track a user is the session scope. Using the blog post comment as an example, this would allow a user to edit their comment as long as their session is alive.<\/p>\n
But, if they want to come back tomorrow and edit their comment, the session scope is out of the question.<\/p>\n
This is where cookies come into play. There are essentially two options with cookies:<\/p>\n
Both options require that you store the identifier in a browser cookie.<\/p>\n
Option #1 is more flexible. If you encrypt the users IP address and store it in a browser cookie, as well as in your database table, you could later re-identify this user as the owner of a given object (a blog post comment, for example). However, it's quite simple to spoof an IP address or user agent, so all a malicious user would have to do is know another users IP address to gain full access to their content.<\/p>\n
Option #2 is safer. However, option #2 will only allow anonymous account access to one browser (as opposed to option #1 allowing access to any PC\/browser combo sharing the same IP address). With option #2, you simply assign a random identifier to a user, then store it in a browser cookie, as well as your database table.<\/p>\n
It would seem, that option #2 is a nice alternative to forcing a user to create an account.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let's face it, having to create an account is probably the number 1 reason that users avoid doing anything trivial on the web. By trivial,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":""},"categories":[15,41],"tags":[121,120],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sitekickr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}