Feature request: Store actions made by anonymous users about django-activity-stream HOT 5 CLOSED

hey, great use case. activity-stream should allow this but im not sure how. actor, target and action_object are all generic foreign keys meaning that what they reference must be defined in the db someplace. if the actor is anonymous you'd still have to create some intermediate model (maybe based on ip or uuid) to reference in the Action. in that case it is probably best to just go ahead and create a proper User object for anonymous users when they create an action. maybe activity-stream should implement this option?

from django-activity-stream.

As far as I see, target and action_object can be blank, though they are generic foreign keys. So a simple solution (without storing IPs) would be to just allow actor_content_type and actor_object_id be blank, implying "None = anonymous" for actor. This would eliminate errors when I pass request.user to action.send and it fails because the user is anonymous (and does not contain _meta, needed in get_for_model function). I've created a patch here: https://bitbucket.org/goldan/django-activity-stream/changeset/bfadb06f7778 (sorry for the blank lines, they're modified automatically by my editor).

As for IPs, I don't think that activity-stream should create any User objects, since it's rather a generic app, not bound to User model. I think there should exist a separate app for managing anonymous users (I believe it does), so using such an app, one would just pass an CustomAnonymousUser or whatever object to activity-stream and store his actions without any problem.

from django-activity-stream.

thats fine for actions where the target or action objects are anonymous but what about when an anonymous user is the actor (eg 'anonymous user liked your blog')? actor is required and therefore has to be a model someplace to complete the generic foreign key relationship. your patch just fails silently in this case

from django-activity-stream.

after a lot of thinking ive decided that the activity streams only apply to registered users (User instances). If you wish to track anonymous users' actions then consider making temporary User instances or something like django-social-auth

from django-activity-stream.

Is there anything wrong with just allowing a null actor? For example,

#in action_handler (pls excuse compact code)
if actor is None and not settings.ALLOW_NULL_ACTOR:
    raise Exception(...)
...
actor_content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(actor) if actor is not None else None,
actor_object_id = actor.pk if actor is not None else 0,

from django-activity-stream.