Today I was trying to help out a client to set up one of their existing lists for anonymous access. I followed the usual procedure of editing the list permissions and then navigating to the anonymous access settings. However, all the checkboxes on the page were greyed out.

I checked the anonymous access settings on both the site collection and the website and they all seemed fine. I checked another existing list and that seemed fine as well. Then I created a new list based on the same template as the list I was trying to configure, and that worked as well! Weird…

So I started searching on Google and came across a blog post about anonymous access on surveys here: http://www.teuntostring.net/blog/2007/07/using-surveys-on-anonymous-access.html. It’s mentioned there that in order for anonymous access to work, the setting for ‘Read Access’ needs to be ‘All Responses’, otherwise the checkboxes will be greyed out. Then I remembered that we’re using a similar setting our list, for privacy concerns.

I went back to the list, changed the setting for ‘Read Access’ to ‘All items’, went back to the anonymous access settings page, and voila! The checkboxes were no longer greyed out.

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