Thread:Project:Support desk/Anonymous page access/reply

Hi!

Granting anonymous access to one single page in MediaWiki and not to the others is no problem. That is technically possible. However, there are other problems:

When you want anonymous access, you will have to disable all logs that you find. E.g. does Apache store an access.log and an error.log. PHP has an error log as well. These might (will!) contain sensitive data and so should be deactivated.

As for MediaWiki I am not completely sure, how/if complete anonymity is possible: MediaWiki holds a database cache with fragments of the rendered pages. I am not sure, what exactly is in it, but that might als contain information about the single users. See the objectcache table in the database.

Another aspect is editing pages: For each edit MediaWiki creates a revision and with each revision it logs the user's IP address (this also happens, although not visible from outside, when the user is actually logged in and so also could be identified by his username). I don't know right now, if and if so how this can be deactivated, but I know that there are situations where law might force you as a website owner to keep certain information (and if only for a limited amount of time). In case of Wikipedia, the main reason MediaWiki exists, this information must be stored and so there is no real reason for the Wikimedia developers to implement functionality, which would remove this information.

And if you say you want to have only one single page, which can be accessed anonymously, while for the rest everything is logged as usual, then this even makes it harder. Spontaneously I would say: In this case (one single page with anonymous access while the rest is not anonymous), in this case MediaWiki is not what you are looking for.