getting anonymous for user when running a report

Oct 29, 2012

I have some content that users have viewed. When I run a report to see who has viewed the content I get anonymous for the user. What is happening? It shows me in the list but no other names. The content is set for public viewing.

17 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi Tom! Welcome to E-Learning Heroes!

If your content is public, a login is not required. So if your content is proprietary or not intended for anyone outside your organization to view it, make sure your content permissions are set to Private

Since your content is set to public content, you also will not get as detailed tracking capabilities when you run reports on your content since you won’t know who’s viewing the content. One way around this, which some of our customers do for public content that they’d still like to track, is to add a Guestbook in front of the content and require the email address from the user. With this method, you can still track quiz results and more with public content, but if users are sharing a computer, subsequent accesses of the same content from the same computer by different users will appear as the same user — since a local cookie is set on the computer.

You can set your content permissions like this:

  • Login to your account as an administrator or publisher.
  • Click the Content tab and then the name of the content in question.
  • Click the Permissions tab for the content and then the Change button to specify Public or Private.
  • For Private content, select the Groups and/or Users who can access the content, then click Save.

Jeanette also covers this process in the above screencast.

Let me know if this helps!

Have a great day,

Christine

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Tom,

Regarding the guestbook option I mentioned earlier, I found a fantastic tutorial provided by Jeanette on the topic.

You can find a screen cast here. The original guide is provided here.

Articulate Online offers a Guestbook feature, which allows you to collect whatever data you want about the users who view your content. Once you set up a Guestbook for a particular content item, users who access that content will see a Guestbook page, where they enter information you request, before they view your course. 

If your content is public, a Guestbook is a handy way to collect information about the people who view your content. A Guestbook can also be used for private users, if you’d like to collect specific user data that isn’t already part of your users’ profiles. (Learn more about public and private users here.)

Here’s how to set up Guestbook fields for any content item you’ve uploaded to Articulate Online:

  1. In Articulate Online, select the content item for which you want to create a Guestbook.
  2. Click the Guestbook tab.
  3. Click the Change button on right right-hand side of the screen.
  4. Select the items you want to include as Guestbook fields, and for each one, indicate whether it's Optional or Required.
  5. If you change your mind about any of the fields you’ve selected, just select the field again and choose Don’t Ask.
  6. If you want to collect some information that's not in the list, click Add Custom Field at the bottom. In the window that pops up, enter some text for the custom field you want to create, and click Save. (Note: When you create a custom field, it defaults to Optional, but you can make it Required by selecting the custom field you’ve created and choosingRequired.) 

    Keep in mind that if you do create a custom field that you plan to use for other content items as well, be sure to type it the same way for each content item's Guestbook. Otherwise, when you report on the data, it will look confusing because it will be treated as two separate fields.
  7. In the text area below the list of fields, you can customize the instructions your users see on the guestbook, if you like.
  8. When you’re finished, click Save at the bottom of the page.

Now, when learners view that content item, they’ll see a page similar to the one below, where they enter their information and click Continue. (Note that if you chose to include Email as one of your Guestbook fields, when private users view your content, the email field will be completed for them automatically.)

Where is Guestbook data used?

You can report on the Guestbook data you collect by going to the Reports tab and choosing the Guestbook Responsesreport. When you do that, you’ll see data for the five most common fields that administrators typically like to include (email, first name, last name, job title, and company).

If you didn’t include these items in your Guestbook, or if you made any of them optional, some cells might be blank.

To see any additional items you’ve included in your Guestbook, you can export your data to CSV or XML format. The output will contain all the data collected:

You can also include Guestbook data in any custom reports you create. And, if you’ve specified in your Articulate Online settings that you want to Include full user profile data in exported CSV and XML reports (as shown in the screen below), then any reports you export will include data from  the standard Guestbook fields. Custom fields, however, are not included in the export.

I hope this information is helpful!

Thanks,

Christine

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Smith,

Are you testing it in the same browser that you've set up your Articulate Online course in? If so, it sounds like you may want to test it in a new browser or even incognito/private browsing window. That should allow you to see the login prompt, but lots of the logins will be kept in a cache of logins so that they may not be prompted to log in again. 

Katie Riggio

Hi, Gillian – and those following along!

Circling back here to share Gren's suggestion regarding finding anonymous users in the Guestbook data:

As the Guestbook data is being saved on the browser cache, the only way that we've found that can cause an "Anonymous" user in the reports is to clear the browser cache while viewing the content. See the exact steps to replicate the issue here:

1) Launch the content 
2) Fill in the Guestbook fields 
3) Delete/Clear the browser cache while you still have the content on the screen. 
4) Close the browser. 

Therefore, kindly advise your users to avoid clearing the cache after they have launched and are currently viewing your course in Articulate Online.

Hope that helps, and we'll be here if you need anything else!

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