MT3 comment management system: moderating, white listing, plus...
Posted on March 23, 2004 @ 08:53 in MovableType
Okay, this is a quick post after reading the Typekey faq that was just posted. I think that Typekey addresses some issues, but here I want to comment on the comment management system that is briefly discussed in the faq (also posted to the MT Support Forum).
It's good to see there is an option for moderating in MT3, but it would be so much better IMHO if the following was implemented (separate/in addition to Typekey):
* a local whitelist. I would love to be able to add specific username/e-mail address combinations to a whitelist so that when people post using these credentials they bypass the moderation process.
Friends and frequent commenters can be added, newcomers will have to wait for approval. This gives the weblog author a lot of freedom with dealing with commenters (put someone on the whitelist after 1, 2, or 15 good comments). Of course, a spammer could bypass this system by using the credentials of an already whitelisted person, but! if you like me never make a commenters e-mail address visible on your weblog, then it in effect functions as a password.
Total pro for this scheme would be that the commenter never has to do anything to make this work and the weblog author has all the freedom who and when to include in the whitelist.
I think it would be very easy to implement, but I'm no programmer, so I wouldn't really know...
If the above is implemented, the following should also be implemented:
* MT should show a generic message in place of a not-yet-approved comment. If you comment on a post and your comment is held back by the moderation system, then in its place there should be a message that says something to the effect of "Here be a comment when it gets approved."
That way the commenter is given feedback that his comment went through and other commenters to the site will be aware that there are not-yet-approved comments in the 'thread' they are commenting to that will be revealed later and hence might change the ongoing discussion retro-actively.
These two additions would, I think, make the the commenting system much more robust and keep it both very simple to use, both for the commenter and the weblog author.
Comments and Trackbacks
Hmm, well with today's teaching done and reading the faq again with more coffee in my tummy, it seems that this should be possible. It says:
"[Y]ou still have the option of building your own authentication system and hooking it into Movable Type. Documentation for doing so will be available soon after the Movable Type 3.0 release."
Hopefully someone will release a plugin that does what I described above, or I will have to learn to program plugins myself.
Either way, I think the comment system could do with the augmentations I mentioned out of the box, but, I definitely, and more clearly now, see which problems the Typekey system is addressing, the biggest one being management of credentials. For a small site like mine this shouldn't be much of a problem, but keeping your own decentralized "whitelist" or authentication system doesn't scale particularly well.
I think SixApart made the right decision to offer combinations of ways you want people to be able to comment. That way, you can pick and choose which authentication systems you want to use and how loose or restrictive you want to be about it.
Posted by Frank on March 23, 2004 @ 14:08
I run a newspaper style blog for a small college. A centralized comment registration system, ala Typeky, would simply not work for such sites whose users don't even know what a blog is.
MT's sucessful application as a CMS shows it is far more versatile than a blogging tool. Why limit the comment registration system to the blogger community?
Posted by Abido on March 30, 2004 @ 19:46
Well, the point is, I think, that TypeKey is not limited to weblogs only. It's simply a centralized point of authentication and because of its API any number of applications can make use of it.
I agree though that for a small (newspaper style) weblog with readers predominantly unaware of weblogs (central) registration wouldn't work. Just like I don't think it will work very well on my site, apart from the fact that I _want_ to keep the commenting system as accessible as possible.
As for the versatility of MT as a CMS, yea! I want even more versatility! If it runs on a database for filing posts... why can't we have user definable fields and sort everything every which way we want, all with the fine MT interface. Now that would be heaven :-)
Posted by Frank on March 31, 2004 @ 10:09
Quote:
"Personally I'm hoping to see a new incarnation of MT-Blacklist that plugs into the comment management API."I do not. A blacklist is something you have to maintain yourself anyway.
By the way, do you know how many MT blogs are running in our country?Posted by Anonymous on March 31, 2004 @ 10:15
That's exactly my point: I don't mind the extra maintenance of MTBlacklist because it's way less work than dealing with comment spam in another way. Besides, Jay Allen was working on an automatic and distributed version of MTBlacklist that would effectively eliminate much of the work that MTBlacklist needs now.
The big upside of using MTBlacklist, imho, is that you can allow everyone to post a comment without any sort of authentication, which is what I prefer, but you can quite easily reject comments based on inapproriate links. And if such a comment slips through, it's easy to delete and rebuilt. Apparently this last point will be addressed in MT3, but the first point is not as far as I can see...
Besides, with the new comment API being what it is, it should be possible to have both, so you can choose which kind of comment system you want to use. If you want to use TypeKey authentication, go ahead... personally I'm hoping someone will hack MTBlacklist into the new comment API to give me what I want.
Posted by Frank on March 31, 2004 @ 10:22
Post a comment
Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.