[Silva-general] SilvaNewsNetwork commenting system

[Tuomas Tonteri]

Thanks for the input.

> Span is a mounting problem. We may not want to have any anonymous
> access. Spam scripts are getting more complex and clever.

Of course, it can be specified, that no anonymous comments are allowed.
But at least I do not except most of the readers to register. If one
wants the best functionality in the spirit of Silva, it would be
possible to put a trainable command line spam filter in there, like
bogofilter.

> The fundamental question is where to store the comment content. Silva
> news articles are stored as xml and versioned, so it wouldn't make
> sense to add the comments to the xml. For instance that would change
> the last modified date of the article. Often news articles are
> adjusted after publication, because someone finds a typo. Or as a
> result of a comment! :-)
> 
> Some sort of 'attached' object would be needed that contains all the
> comment content and comment management functionality. This could be
> attached to news articles or Silva documents or any metatype.

There could be a button at Silva properties tab called "Enable threaded
discussions", which child publications would inherit like other
metadata. The button would be greyed out or missing, if "Silva
Discussions", product would not be installed.

Only specified metatypes would have discussion, but as default Silva
News Article and Silva Document would be selected. And like
you said, one discussion for the whole article, independent of versions.

Now SD would take care of rendering the comments, handling the
moderation and storing the threaded comments.

As to how SD would be 'attached' to an object, here is my idea: If every
instance of some metadata type has an unique variable, independent of
its location, then use that ID in these two cases:

Call to render the public view of a discussion with an ID. If this was
the first call with this ID to SD, then an empty form is rendered. When
a first comment is left, new discussion with that ID is created. And
now the public view of that discussion will be the comments and the
form.

And of course, if SD is enabled for a certain instance of a metatype, it
makes a call with its ID to the public view of the discussion when its
public view is displayed.

The secound way to interact with SD is a call to moderate a discussion
with some ID.

For the basic functionality, that should be enough.

Would this work?

-- 
Tuomas Tonteri