English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
On a website, if you log in, you're in a logged in state, if you then log out, you are in a logged out state.
What do you call the state before you have ever logged in to a site? Is it correct to also call that being logged out? Is not logged in the same as logged out?
I'm looking for a word or phrase that would apply to either registered or not registered users looking at the site.
Example usage:
We allow configuring some settings from a not logged in view.
The process of confirming a user's credentials and logging them in is often known as 'authentication'. Therefore, a commonly accepted term for a user's state before logging in would be 'unauthenticated'. (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/unauthenticated)
This would apply equally to registered and unregistered users as well as users that have failed to provide the correct tokens - in any of these cases authentication has not been completed.
A distinction can be made between 'not logged in' and 'logged out', in that 'logged out' may imply that the system has a record of a previous session where the user was logged in.
