lolagoetz if I were to create an 'anonymous' role, how would I add anonymous users to that role?
You don't have to add them to a role, you just let the permissions at the category level grant it to them. You just don't want to put default grant at the community level because it causes cascading problems (including the verified users you mentioned).
This is really complicated to explain without seeing what your default settings are at the community level and then at the other nodes.
If you want to reach out, I may be able to provide some more guidance offline.
