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Guest Identity Capture

!!! info "TL;DR" People can answer surveys, vote, and submit ideas without creating an account. Canviq offers them an email address prompt at the moment they finish, and the ones who give it show up under Admin → Guests with the surface they came from. Guests who later sign in keep everything they did anonymously.

Why this exists

A signup wall in front of a survey costs you responses. Canviq removes the wall and asks for the email afterwards instead, when the person has already done the thing you wanted. You trade a lower barrier for a partial contact list rather than trading responses for a complete one.

Where the prompt appears

Four surfaces capture an email, and each response is tagged with which one it came from:

Surface When it appears
survey After an anonymous respondent completes a survey
post_submit On the success screen after submitting an idea
inline As the last field of the submission form itself
roadmap From the public roadmap

The prompt reads "Stay in the loop?" and is always skippable. Nobody is blocked from participating for declining it.

The Guests page

Admin → Guests (/admin/guests). Admins and owners only.

The page has three parts:

  • Stats across the top: how many identities you have captured and how many opted in.
  • Filters: opt-in state, consent surface, and a date range.
  • Table: the captured identities, sortable.

Exporting

The export endpoint returns CSV with the columns id, email, org_id, consent_at, consent_surface, and created_at.

There are two modes. The default exports every captured identity. Marketing mode narrows to guests who came through the survey surface and gave email marketing consent, which is the set you can legitimately send campaigns to. Use marketing mode for anything promotional. The full export is for support and analysis inside your own product.

What guests can do

A guest with a captured email can:

  • Sign in later at /auth/guest with a magic link or Google
  • View what they submitted from their guest profile page
  • Unsubscribe from any notification email without signing in

When a guest signs in and verifies their address, the submissions, votes, comments, and survey responses they made anonymously transfer onto that account. They do not lose their history by upgrading, which is what makes the prompt worth showing.

Deletion and retention

A guest can delete their own identity. Deletion is immediate and permanent: their votes are deleted outright, and their comments, submissions, and survey responses have the guest link stripped from them the moment the request completes. Only the guest_users row itself is left behind, and it is not blanked: it still holds the profile fields it always did (email, name, avatar) until a nightly job permanently deletes the row once it has sat marked-deleted for more than 30 days. That row does not show up in the export above during the wait, since the export only returns identities that have not been marked deleted. The 30-day window delays the row's final deletion; it is not a recovery period, and there is no way to reverse a deletion once requested, including by contacting the team.

This 30-day purge delay is the only waiting period in Canviq's deletion behavior. Member account deletion works differently: it is a manual email request processed by hand. See User Profile.

Capturing an email is not the same as consent to market to it. consent_at and consent_surface record when and where the address was given, and the marketing export mode is the filter that keeps campaign sends on the right side of that line. Treat the unfiltered export as operational data, not a mailing list.