Bypass individual login requirements?

We really like the direction that metabase is heading, but the requirement that every user needs an individual login really clashes with the way people access information on our network. Requiring every person in our organization to get a “work” google mail account is clumsy, and needing to manage an internal email distribution just to get people to the “ask a question” page is even worse. Is there any way to just bypass this login requirement all together to link my users straight to the ask a question page? Has anyone figured out a way to just serve the site in a “logged in” (a single account) state when served to the user base?

I haven’t tried this, but have you looked into the “Public Sharing” feature in the admin panel?

(edit: not sure if this allows self-serve question creation… it seems like it might only work for pre-defined dashboards/questions)

Yeah it only works for predefined questions and dashboards. Our use case is significantly heavier on the ‘rapidly generating tabular data’ front and doesn’t really benefit from the saved dashboards and stuff. People just need to be able to quickly get in, ask a question, and export a dataset as typically it’s just going to be loaded into another analytical software that doesn’t have the option of directly connecting to a data source or just generally isn’t as friendly as the metabase frontend.

I’m fortunate(?) enough to be in a place where individual accounts are part of the culture; I’m pretty excited about LDAP integration to avoid yet-another-account for our users. Maybe there’ll be an anonymous mode added (it kind of makes sense for purely internal uses); until then, are you able to share a single login with everyone?

So… I just tested this on my instance, and it’s possible to directly insert a user entry into the database…

The table: core_user

The fields:

  • email
  • first_name
  • last_name
  • password
  • password_salt
  • date_joined
  • is_active

With the right permissions, you can manually add an account that can be shared, and the e-mail address doesn’t need to exist, but it needs to parse as a valid address. It’s definitely a hack, but it might get you going for now?

(edit: I copied password and password_salt from an existing account)

(edit2: directly inserting the user/email bypasses the email confirmation step)

Oh nice thinking, I’ll give that a shot. Thanks man!