Hide or change username across site collection

Question

I am developing a custom solution, based on an Enterprise Wiki template, that has a requirement for a degree of anonymity - basically, hide the actual username of all contributors from other site contributors and viewers.

My first thought is to allow each user to change their display name in their profile - however, that will affect the entire web app and I only want this change to occur on the site collection and subsites hosting this solution. For reasons "above my paygrade" this solution cannot be hosted on a dedicated web app, although if I find out this is otherwise impossible it could happen.

My second thought is that I will have to edit various files to remove references to usernames, but I'm not sure how much effort that will involve. (I did open "EnterpriseWiki.aspx" - a master page - and I see the following directive: <%$Resources:wss,wikidiff_lastmodifiedby%>, I imagine I should start there.)

Answer 1

You could probably hide them with jQuery. If you look at the DOM, all user names as links include "_layouts/userdisp.aspx?ID=" in the href declaration. Something like:

$('a[href$="_layouts/userdisp.aspx"]').addClass('s4-die');

s4-die is a built in SharePoint CSS class that is simply declared as display: none !important;

Then you just have to figure out how to hide the "Modified by:" text. Hope this helps as a start.

Answer 2

Your best shot is to write an unvisible web part hosted on the home page of your site collection and that will access the User Information List to anonymize the user's Full Name property. This will effectively hide the user's name wherever it appears in that specific site collection.

Hope this helps,

Raphael.