Slashcode

00/04/05/1536233 story

Anonymous Coward Euphemisms

posted by pudge on 11:36 AM April 5th, 2000      

Anonymous Coward writes "I've got my copy of 0.9.4 up and running without real problems. What I'd like to do is some modification for a non-geek user crowd; specifically, I'd like to change "Anonymous Coward" to "Unidentified User" or some other such less stigmatizing term and make a few other global changes. Due to the interaction of the Perl code and database stuff, I'm not sure how to go about doing it without becoming awfully familiar with the code (which I will eventually, anyway). Anyone done this? "

• fun (Score:1)

  by norny (41)

  Here's what I like doing.
  
  Just open slash.pm, user.pl, and comments.pl in an editor that has a Find/Replace function and find "Anonymous Coward" and replace all with whatever you want.
  
• Re:easy enough to change (Score:1)

  by Taxslave (262)

  Easy enough. Search and replace in Slash.pm, users.pl and comments.pl

  Now Tar Heel State Online [tarheelstateonline.com]'s Anon posters will appear as "Anonymous Yankee."

  I had only changed the database, thus far. Closer and Closer to my destination every day.
  
• ACs (Score:1)

  by pudge (6)

  First, I recently added code (yesterday) to a test site to turn off Anonymous Cowards with a configuration option. That will be cool for a lot of sites, I think. Note, though, that this does not remove Anonymous Cowards -- this is needed for the site to function when people are not logged in -- but it just prevents them from posting.
  
  Second, I only saw two things that you would need to change for "Anonymous Coward" to be something else. One is in the code, and I already made a note to fix that. The other is the "nickname" (and subsequent "matchname") field for uid 1 in the users table in the database.
  
  
• Re:You can also mysql it (Score:1)

  by pudge (6)

  No, you can't. Well, you can't do JUST that, you need to do more.
  
  The code itself depends on the name "Anonymous Coward". This is changed for the next release, so it will use whatever nickname you have set in the users table for uid -1.
  
• You can also mysql it (Score:1)

  by Ephro (717)

  I changed it by logging into the mysql server as the slash code then executing the following command:
  
  update users set nickname='John Q. Public' where uid='-1';
  
  SQL is a great thing.
  
• easy enough to change (Score:1)

  by grnarrow (515)

  Just change the name in the users table in mysql, and in Slash.pm ~line 2093, comments.pl ~line 696, and users.pl ~lines 239 and 964. (the line numbers may have changed in the new version).