Public View or Guest autologin

[sanbroz]

Describe the feature/enhancement

Add a public view user for listening to audiobooks without login.

[advplyr]

Are you asking for the ability to disable authentication? Please expand on what you are looking for.

[sanbroz]

Yes, It will be nice if users can explore the catalog publicly and listen to books after login. We can also add a option to listen complete audiobook without login. A preview audio track can be added for public view. I am planning to use the project for running a community audio book website

[hobesman]

Interesting concept. Maybe add an option to make the account view only (no listening), sample only (30 seconds, or two minutes, or whatever), or full listening ability.

Most "users" are designed to track progress, and only envision one stream at a time. Those would have to be reconsidered for a guest account.

Would the guest account just not track/store progress? Or how would that be handled?

I believe someone else already requested a "preview" feature which could be made available to all users, and that progress obviously shouldn't be stored.

But if you give the guest account full listening ability, I suspect that shouldn't be stored either, if there's a chance multiple people will use the same "guest" access.

Basically any progress sync the server receives from the "guest" account could be responded to as normal (so the client can remain basically unmodified) but the server then simply discards the progress instead of saving it.

[hackmonker]

Yeah exactly. The guests can maybe listen to the book but wont store their progress. if they need to store progress, they must sign up

[Natetronn]

I'd like to see "Guest" libraries. Where we can create a new library, perhaps with a "Guests" toggle option; this so we can select an item or multiple items and then there could be an option to "share to X" guest library (or something like that), which then adds the item to the shared guest library or guest libraries of our choosing.

Then we can add users to said guest libraries like normal or turn off authentication/users completely for a specific library, as others have requested. Perhaps it would make use of "symbolic links" to books, this way books aren't duplicated and no real extra space is required.

The use case being that I'd like to share specific audio/ebooks of my library with family members, but not all items of a library. I also don't want to have to create hard copies, one by one, into a seperate "Guests" library, as that takes up a bunch of extra space and time to duplicate books.

[buddyhollyy]

I would also like an option to disable authorization on a local network. Not as interested in having 'guest' logins or libraries, but I could make that work...