Is this even possible?

I would think private forums on vBulletin would work fine. You could then allow guests to post. That would be pretty darn anonymous.

Following dvduval's suggestion, you could create a front page that explains a simple system for signing up for an account. Have your members create new free Email addresses using gmail or yahoo, and sign up with fake names on your forum using fake names, and this new email. This would allow people to have conversations without losing track of who is who, but no one really knowing who each person is, other than a simple nickname.

You could also disallow the use of Avatars, and post rules that no one is to ask for or give personal information. Create an admin account that is easily contacted through the forum, to report anyone that does ask for personal information. This way, those people can be removed for security purposes. This shouldn't happen much, but will allow your visitors to have that extra feeling of security.

Just tossing out some extra ideas. Good luck with your forum!

~ Teravel

You COULD do this EASILY. Unfortunately troublemakers and editing wouldd be hard to control. ALSO, if the law demanded that you release records, you could be in trouble.

Steve

You can get very, very close to true anonymity easily.

Getting actual true anonymity, well ... even if everyone is using a proxy and/or a vpn, someone (the proxy or vpn service itself) probably knows the actual ip of whoever is using that proxy or communicating through that vpn. And such services pretty much have to hand their records (if they have any) over to law enforcement when required.

Some claim they don't keep such records, but it is very likely that they do, at least to an extent, because they've at least got to think about who might abuse their service, hog their resources, or whatever.

Besides all that, there is good reason to believe that almost anyone can be identified (eventually) given enough interest and resources to track them down. Of course that kind of interest and that kind of resources are limited and have to be focused where they are most needed, so the member in question would probably have to do or say something rather outrageously illegal to get that kind of attention ...

Still ... true anonymity ... well, the problem is, you would probably never be able to know for sure whether your members had it or not ... but as I said, almost true anonymity would be a piece of cake.

I agreed with the VPN idea. There are some offshore VPN that will destroy all of your records after you have made the payment so there is no way to link it back to the purchaser. Also you can use pre-paid cc for the purchase, therefore making it completely anonymous.

Yeah, the forum method would definitely work.

I mean, there are a ton of folks here who are truly anonymous (regardless if they use a cartoon or not) :p