Allow anonymous users to contribute to retros without creating an account

[drewhousman1010]

A user 🔒 writes:

How do I enable anonymous access to a retrospective board? Anonymous submissions is a standard of trust we have built and I could not ask 10-200 people to go create an account. This is an easy retro feature. I can allow anonymous access and anyone with the link can post.

[jordanh]

I am glad to see this one back again! I bet we'll spool up lots of feedback here...

[acressall]

@ackernaut and I discussed this recently re: public retros! Here are our rapid fire thoughts from a 5min discussion:
- We’re wanting to do it (Remotely Agile, public user feedback), why not let users do it too?
- Paid feature?
- not tied to a team or org
- doesn’t introduce vulnerabilities to their account or org
- does a team own a public retro?
- doesn’t have integrations because doesn’t need it
- only facilitator can have tasks?
- doesn’t connect back to a team dash; it’s output only
- will folks try to gamify? pay for an org of 1 and hold public retros with their teams

[acressall]

Personally, I would love to hear how big of a lift this is on the dev side and potentially try it out as way to push pro conversion

[ackernaut]

+1 I think stripping away the teaming features might make public retros safe in terms of gamification of the model.

• No tasks (you need a private team!)
• No task or chat integrations (you need a private team!)
• No password-protected (I think folks are going to ask for this, you need Pro!)
• Participants are anonymous, randomized avatars (you need a private team!)
• Limitations (you get 1 public retro a month on the Free plan, you can run test retros in a sandbox that you can’t own or keep the output, Pro = unlimited public retros, including password-protected)

I think the lift would be bigger than we think. I think we would need to validate this in a cheap way. I think there are other concerns we need to validate sooner than this regarding our tiers like how to convert, and what limitations/features make sense per tier.

[ackernaut]

This is an easy retro feature. I can allow anonymous access and anyone with the link can post.

Sounds like they have what the need 🤪 or do they want the affordances of Parabol without 10-200 users haha?

[ackernaut]

A few more ideas:

• Free:
  • 1 public retro can be managed a month (can open, close, re-open, reset) etc.
  • It’s a sandbox activity; you can still create teams, have private activities on those teams, etc.
  • The retro automatically closes after a timeframe, on Pro you can keep it open longer
  • When you look back on a public retro for contributions, you only have access to it so long. On Pro you have unlimited history of public retro summaries.

[github-actions]

Stale issue

[jordanh]

Removing stale from this. Reviewing this now is a good prompt to add some recent feedback.

We recently met with a software factory within the U.S. Space Force. One of their software development process practice leads told us that the primary inhibitor from using Parabol was that we required authenticated access to run an activity. Especially for involving contractors, they'd like a way to open up particular activities (or even phases within activities) to public participation.

We will gather more information from them

[igorlesnenko]

Linking some old prototype: #7164

[github-actions]

Stale issue