[UX] Clarify what the anonymous visitors setting will do (do not confuse with role name)

[klonos]

Steps To Reproduce

1. Navigate to /admin/config/people/roles

2. Either add another user role, intended to be used as admin, or rename the administrator role that comes out of the box (I went with "God").

3. If you have added a new role in step 2 above, expand the "Administrator role" fieldset and select that role.

4. Expand the "Anonymous visitors" fieldset and change the default name for anonymous users to something other than "Anonymous" (I went with "Ghosts")

   

5. Save settings

6. Navigate to /admin/config/people/permissions

7. Navigate to /admin/config/people/settings

Actual behavior

• the column in /admin/config/people/permissions still says "ANONYMOUS" 👎

• the radio labels in the "Who can register accounts?" setting say "Visitors" 👎

  

Expected behavior

• the column in /admin/config/people/permissions for anonymous should have the same label as specified in step 4
• the radios in the "Who can register accounts?" setting should use the same label as specified in step 4

Additional information
Respective d.org issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/749298

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PR by @klonos: backdrop/backdrop#2492

[klonos]

Turns out that making the header of the permissions table column respect the setting depends on #3510, because that value is pulled from the label of the role, rather than from the 'anonymous' setting in system.core.json. So I just went with fixing only the radio labels in /admin/config/people/settings:

[klonos]

...I have noticed that the "Require email verification..." setting only applies for the 2nd and 3rd options of the "Who can register accounts" radio. I don't mean to scope-creep, but hiding it using #states would be a relatively small change. Should I add it to this PR, or separate issue?

[jenlampton]

I think that you may be misunderstanding the setting for The name you would like used for anonymous visitors to your site. It is not the same thing as the Role name which is what should be used in locations 6 and 7 as outlined in this issue.

This setting controls what appears (to visitors) as the Username in the Submitted by area, when a node, or comment is displayed.

I think this issue should work to rephrase the label for that field, so this is less confusing to others.

[ghost]

approval is required by God

😅😂🤣
That should totally be the default name for the admin role!

[jenlampton]

We used to always name it "hal" back when I first started working at CH3.

[indigoxela]

Seems like there's no progress here since early 2020 - since then the PR is in state "needs work". Time to remove the milestone.

[klonos]

Sorry for the really long time to respond here. I'll update the PR and rebase, to get a sandbox going. Hopefully we can get some UX clarity about this in the upcoming 1.23.2 or at least 1.24.0 release.

[klonos]

This is what I currently have in the PR:

So, in D7 and D8+ this setting lives in the "Account settings" form (admin/config/people/settings):

In D8+ the setting for which role is admin was moved to admin/people/role-settings:

Apparently, we moved both settings under admin/config/people/roles, but since the setting for anonymous vistors/authors is not role-related, I think that admin/config/people/roles is a bad place for it and it causes confusion. I think that it should be moved back to admin/config/people/settings.

@jenlampton? others?

[quicksketch]

How would you feel about moving the string for the Anonymous name to be under the configuration of the Anonymous role? That'd be stashing it in a pretty obscure spot, but also in a spot that makes sense (to me).

[klonos]

@quicksketch nope. ...as I mention in my previous comment, this setting is about a user (a username) - it has nothing to do with roles. Adding it under the configuration of the Anonymous role would make the confusion even worse.

So to sum up:

• one thing is a label for a user role
• the other thing is a username for user 0

[kiamlaluno]

I would put that settings in admin/config/people/settings.

[olafgrabienski]

In my opinion, admin/config/people/roles isn't ideal, but it's not such a bad place, so I'd like to focus first on the text changes (AKA baby steps) and consider separately if we need a better place for the setting. Re text changes, the current PR is already much better than before.

@klonos Are you also planning to integrate Jen's feedback from #3511 (comment), or rather not?

[klonos]

@klonos Are you also planning to integrate Jen's feedback from #3511 (comment), or rather not?

Not sure if any of that is still relevant, but I'll let @jenlampton re-review and reconsider, as I've made some additional changes to the UI text since.

Trying to break down Jen's feedback from back in 2020...

There isn't a whole lot of difference between The name you would like used for anonymous visitors to your site and The name that will be used for anonymous visitors.

This text has now been simplified to Name to be used for anonymous authors. There is a : at the end of that text in the PR, but since we are not including semicolons in field labels, I would like to get rid of it. Will wait for further feedback on the label text before I do that.

I would love to see the label for this field rephrased to remove the confusion with role name, rather than adding Not to be confused with the <em>Anonymous</em> user role in the description.

I have done that I believe, but perhaps we could change the word "Name" with "Username" in the label, in order to distinguish things even further. Fresh feedback on that please?

How about something like Author name to display for Anonymous visitors on content and comments. If we did that, we wouldn't really need any description text at all.

That is really lengthy for a label. It feels like placing text that belongs in help text on the label, which defeats the purpose of the label (labels are to be a short as possible - any clarification goes in the help text).

Lastly, I don't see anything wrong with the "Not to be confused with the %anonymous user role." bit of the help text. It is precise and to the point - exactly what we want people to avoid confusing, which is what it seems to be happening. Even chronic Drupal/Backdrop users seem to be tripped by this all the time ...even yours truly (see the issue summary to see what I mean -before I had a better understanding of things, I was the one to suggest that the heading in the permissions page should change to reflect this setting to begin with). In the initial PR this bit of text was the first thing in the help text - now I have moved it to be the last bit ...a side-note if you like, we can even put it in brackets if you want to diminish its prominence even further.