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On a public feedback board, every post and comment carries its author. For a business-to-business product that can be a problem: your board shows which companies use you, and one customer can see another customer by name. Some organisations cannot adopt a public board at all until that stops. The Customer identity section on the Access & Privacy page solves this with two independent settings. You can turn on either one, or both.
Customer identity lives under Administration, and only workspace owners and admins see it. Both settings require a Business plan or higher: if your plan does not include them, you will be prompted to upgrade when you save.
Your own team is never affected by either setting. Admins keep their real usernames, names, and profile pictures on the board, so a reply from your support team still looks like it came from a person.

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Open the Customer identity settings

Go to Settings → Public Portal & Widget → Access & Privacy and scroll to the Customer identity section at the bottom of the page. The Access & Privacy settings page with the Customer identity section highlighted, showing the Random usernames and Hide full names toggles

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Random usernames

Every user on your board has a username. Unless someone picked their own, Sleekplan creates it from their email address, so sebastian.may@acme.com becomes sebastianmay. That means the username alone can reveal a person and the company they work for. Turn on Random usernames and Sleekplan replaces every customer username with a neutral, randomly generated one, such as yellow_tree or quiet_harbor. Once it is on:
  • Every existing customer is renamed.
  • New customers get a random username when they sign up, whether they register on the board, arrive through single sign-on, or are created by an integration.
  • Customers can no longer change their own username.
  • New @mentions use the new username, so mentioning someone still works and still notifies them.
Names stay readable and distinct, so a conversation is still easy to follow: yellow_tree replied to quiet_harbor.
Random usernames cannot be undone. The usernames your customers have now are replaced, not stored somewhere for later, so turning the setting back off will not bring them back. It only means new customers get to pick their own again.You will not lose track of who anyone is: your team still sees each person’s full name and email address in the admin dashboard, in Customers and on every post.
If your board already has comments, @mentions written before you turned the setting on still show the username that person had at the time, because the mention is part of the comment text. New mentions use the new username. If that matters for a compliance review, turn the setting on before you open the board rather than after.
Because it is permanent, Sleekplan asks you to confirm before the setting can be saved.
1

Turn on Random usernames

A confirmation appears explaining what will change. Read it, then choose Randomize usernames to continue, or Cancel to leave everything as it is.The confirmation dialog reading Randomize every username, with Cancel and Randomize usernames buttons
2

Save your changes

The setting is still a draft until you save. Click Save changes in the bar at the bottom of the page. Renaming starts as soon as you save and runs in the background, so a board with a lot of customers takes a short while to finish.

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Hide full names

Turn on Hide full names and Sleekplan stops showing customers’ real names and profile pictures to anyone but your team. On the board a post then shows only the username, with a plain default avatar. This setting is reversible. Turn it off and the names and pictures appear again, because nothing is deleted: they are simply not sent to the public board while the setting is on. It also closes a quieter gap. With Hide full names on, the @mention autocomplete no longer finds customers by their real name, so nobody can type a colleague’s or competitor’s name into the composer to check whether they use your product.
Turning this on hides profile pictures as well as names. Hiding the name while still showing someone’s photo would not really make them anonymous.

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Which one do you need?

  • Anonymity on the public board, permanently. Turn on both. This is the usual choice when a compliance or security review has asked you to remove customer identity from public pages.
  • Softer privacy, keeping the option to change your mind. Turn on Hide full names only. Names and pictures are hidden, usernames stay as they are, and you can reverse it at any time.
  • Only usernames are the problem (for example, they were generated from work email addresses). Turn on Random usernames only.

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What your team still sees

Neither setting changes what your own team can see. In the admin dashboard, an admin still sees every customer’s real name, email address, and profile picture on posts, comments, and in Customers, so you can still follow up with the person behind a request. The Sleekplan API also keeps returning full names, because it authenticates with your workspace API key rather than as a visitor. Usernames there are the new random ones, since those are the customer’s real username once the setting is on.

Access & privacy

Control who can reach your board and how visitors sign in before they post.

End-user accounts

How customer accounts work and why they live only in your workspace.

GDPR compliance

How Sleekplan handles personal data, and your options for removing it.

User segments

Group your customers so you can see which audience a request came from.