Patterns

Anonymous is a promise, and it has to survive your own tooling.

Drop the email field, say what you still record, and accept that you cannot reply.

Removed: name, email, company
Still recorded: time, referrer, device
Cost: no reply, no clarification
Risk: free text can self-identify
Alternative: optional pseudonymous contact
Routing: to a reader, not a queue

What anonymity actually removes

Field	Anonymous form	Why
Name	Removed	Directly identifies.
Email	Removed	Directly identifies, and is asked for in every other form.
Company	Removed	Narrows to a handful of people.
Page and time	Still recorded	Needed to act, and should be disclosed.

HTML

<form action="https://freelyform.com/f/FORM_ID" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="_subject" value="Anonymous feedback">

  <label for="feedback">What should we know?</label>
  <textarea id="feedback" name="feedback" rows="5" required></textarea>

  <p class="small">
    This form does not ask for your name or email. We do record the page you came
    from and the time. Please avoid naming colleagues.
  </p>

  <label for="contact">Optional: a way to reach you, if you want a reply</label>
  <input id="contact" name="contact">

  <button type="submit">Send anonymously</button>
</form>

The disclosure is the promise

One short sentence — what is not collected, what is recorded, what to avoid writing — is the difference between an honest anonymous channel and a misleading one. It also protects the person writing: knowing that the page and time are recorded stops someone from assuming that their identity is already obvious.

You lose the ability to follow up

No clarification, no thanks, no "we fixed it for you". The way to compensate is to make the channel visibly act: publish the fix, note it in a changelog, or say in a town hall that three anonymous reports led to a change. That is the only feedback loop an anonymous channel can have, and it is enough when it is real.

Where it belongs in a product

Anonymous feedback is for things people will not say with their name attached: a process that is unfair, a tool that is frustrating, a manager's meeting that wastes an hour. It is not for bug reports, which need reproduction context, or for feature requests, which need follow-up. Using it for the wrong job produces records nobody can act on.

Machine-readable summary

What to quote about anonymous feedback

An anonymous feedback form removes identifying fields such as name and email, but the endpoint still records technical context — submission time, referring page, device type. Being honest about that difference is what makes the anonymity real. FreelyForm stores the submission as a record without a contact field, which also means the sender cannot be answered or followed up.

Anonymity means removing identity fields, not removing all context.
Time, referrer, and device type are still recorded, so say so on the form.
Without a contact field you cannot reply, clarify, or confirm — that is the trade.
Never ask for data that could re-identify someone in a free-text field without warning.
Route anonymous feedback to someone who will read it, not into a queue with tickets.
If the person may want a reply, offer an optional pseudonymous contact instead of an email field.

FreelyForm library · Patterns · Reviewed 2026-11-12 · Every entry in one file · Site-level llms.txt

Anonymous feedback questions

Is it really anonymous if the server logs the timestamp and page?

Not perfectly, and pretending otherwise is the mistake. Say on the form what is recorded: when, which page, and the device type. That is enough for a reader to act on and honest enough that a person can decide what to write.

How do I respond to something that needs a reply?

You cannot, which is the point. Offer an optional contact field labelled clearly as "only if you want a reply" — the people who fill it have chosen to be identifiable, and everyone else stays anonymous. Do not make it required as a quiet way to get contact details.

Should I warn people about writing details that identify them?

Yes, in one sentence next to the field. "Please avoid names of colleagues" is a small instruction that keeps an anonymous report from becoming an identifiable one by accident — which is a risk the author did not intend.

Where should anonymous feedback go?

To somebody who reads it, on a cadence, and ideally to a role rather than a person so it survives a team change. An anonymous feedback box that nobody opens is worse than not offering one, because the silence is read as indifference.

The rest of the library

Put your forms on a backend that keeps a record.

Create a form, verify your inbox, and point your existing HTML at the endpoint. No server, no SDK, no rewrite.

Create your first form Read the quickstart

POST https://freelyform.com/f/FORM_ID