Perhaps comment modding?
Thinking about how the humorless trolls in Luke’s comments sound rather like Slashdot comments with a score of 1 got me thinking that maybe weblog comments ought to adopt a similar moderation scheme.
I really don’t want to completely silence people who leave stupid troll comments or turn on shotgun-TrackBack and ping even when they are just linking without comment, but I’d like to not see them most of the time, and not have them indexed.
I doubt that I’ll have the attention-span to actually do the heavy lifting, but it shouldn’t be all that tough to add a moderation field to the MT comment database, some UI in the “edit this comment” page, a link to that page in the notification email, and a tag plus some CSS to set unwanted comments to display:none with a link to turn them back on. For extra credit, integrate it with MTThreadedComments so that any reply to a modded-down comment defaults to modded-down, with the option to promote it.
Or switch to Manila, that has the simple ability to delete individual comments. (Ducking.)
Why, you self-promoting shill… oh.
Actually, MT does delete individual comments, though I don’t have enough of a problem to have put the link into the notification email yet (TrackBack I have). But as anyone who has ever deleted a troll’s comment and banned the IP address he was using at the time knows, they are like weeds: lop the top off and you just get three more. I just wonder whether leaving them saved, and displayable, but not displayed by default (and not indexed, since I’m pretty sure that Google at least doesn’t index things hidden with display:none) would satisfy their desire to leave their mark, without forcing everyone to scroll past them. Dunno, I really don’t have very much experience with trolls.
That’s not the issue. MT can delete individual comments too. This is about moderating and filtering.
I was actually thinking about this on the way home from some errands today. How difficult would it be to create a user-definable comment filter? Slashdot does this at an article level, you can log in and specify in your preferences that you don’t want to see any articles by Jon Katz (among others). If someone didn’t want to see any comments by Dave Winer, or Mark Pilgrim, or whomever, what would be the best way to accomplish that?
I think the first hurdle would be requiring identification in a way that would work, which brings us back to the discussion of FOAF ”You know me” buttons and PGP signing from a few months (?) back. If you require per-weblog registration, I’m not going to play, simple as that. There are several interesting people who link to or ping me, with good points I’d like to comment on, but they require registration to leave a comment, and homie don’t play that game.
I still think the most reasonable thing to do, since a weblogger’s identity is tied to a domain, rather than anything like a phone number or meeting someone in person, is to support signing with link to a public key, just like pb’s been doing for months now. It’s maybe not perfect, since if I think you’ve stopped looking at comments from /pgp/my_public_key I’ll just move it to /nyaah/my_key, but the first step to voting people off your island is to identify them wherever they may be, and that’s the only scheme I’ve seen that seems likely to work.
Can’t I just say ”don’t show me any comments posted with an author URL that contains ”diveintomark.org”?
’Scuse me while I put away my shotgun and get out the .22
To do nothing but make comments disappear, for a person with a single URL (watch for me to start swapping in archives.blogspot.com), if URL is mandatory, you could. In fact, even if it’s optional, that would be an interesting thing to watch people game: ”would I rather get that incoming link from my comment, or have I been such a bore that people will have tuned me out, so I’ll have to drop my URL to be heard?”
Interesting in a number of ways. I’d never do it myself, every time I decide to never see another word someone writes, I end up sucked back in, but I wonder none the less. Could you do it with a user stylesheet? Wipe out the parent block-level element of any disliked href? Is there any way to apply the equivalent of a user stylesheet, but in javascript?
Phil: I dunno about anyone else, but there are tangible benefits to the user if he registers to comment in my little corner of the universe. For example, automatic email notification when someone responds… or making your response a private comment. (You can also control the size of the edit textarea, a major peeve of mine in most blog comment systems.)
OTOH, I’ve decided to go ahead and enable anonymous comments, with the caveat that anon posts go into a moderation queue and won’t be visible to the public until approved.
I personally can’t see doing much with PGP or FOAF in this context, ’cause I can’t justify spawning HTTP requests from the server every time someone decides to respond.
(Is there an emoticon for a blank, innocent look?)
Say, that’s nice! Glad to hear you aren’t requiring registration anymore. Allow it, provide incentives, that’s great, and I may find myself registering for them, but require it and I move on.
You don’t actually have to do any of the work server-side to reap some of the benefits: all pb does is offer up the URL someone left for their public key, along with the signed comment, and it’s up to anyone curious to do their own verification (and their own interpretation of identity based on who might control the server where the key lives). Given a standard way to link from HTML to FOAF, and from FOAF to a public key (I asked, months back, but didn’t get an unequivocal answer), you could do it server-side (once, on submission), and then display them as ”Posted by Phil Ringnalda (verified from philringnalda.com)” or something like that, but even doing it all client-side is still pretty sweet, when you aren’t sure if that comment by John Q. Smith is really by the John Q. Smith that you know from qsmith.com.
Hey, even my wife has been bugging me on this front. She’s been wanting anonymous comments for her blog for a few weeks. I figured I’d just quit fighting and find a way to make them work without screwing up everything else I’m trying to achieve.
(Oh, and as for incentives to register, it’s also worth pointing out that registered users can edit their comments. Unregistered folks must live eternally with the shame of their typos.)
Of course, the downside to all of this is that I’ve now turned on a feature than I included in the code but never intended to actually *use*. This means that I’m suddenly seeing all kinds of small things that need to be improved. (I can’t bear to leave stuff at the ”well, it works” stage.) I’m even looking at using the same approach when dealing with Trackbacks… allowing them to be stored alongside all the other comments, but moderated by default, with an extra field in the Message table indicating the nature of the message.
Hm… maybe I need to pester the Trotts to support username/password info in the TB ping. That way Registered User A could ping me, sign in, and edit the TB excerpt/link.
I’m rambling again. Stopping now.
You don’t need registration to allow people to edit comments. See Joe’s scheme for Bulu.
Mark: I don’t care for that, personally. As a one-time, edit-it-now-while-you-can option, I suppose it’s okay. But forcing someone to bookmark a secret URL for future editing is far more arcane than a quickie registration process, especially given that the registration only happens once.
With that said, I would like to improve my registration flow. Right now, you go through the same process, whether you want to simply post a comment or create a blog. I can see creating a user type somewhere between ”guest” and ”member” that doesn’t require any more steps than an MT comment while locking out all the extra goodies.
I suppose that’s where something like FOAF could come in… fetch their profile from their server the first time, create an account from it, and set a cookie. I’ll have to spend some time going over FOAF a little more closely, to see if there’s enough info there for my needs.
It should be fairly easy to allow comment-editing without either registration or bookmarking a secret url. All you’d have to do is store a cookie on the user’s machine containing the MD5 hash of the comment-id.
Since Comment-IDs are assigned sequentially, and often (as in this blog) form part of the permalink to the comment, they won’t serve as a good ”shared secret”. Instead (you’ll need to create a new column in your MySQL database to store it), create a ”uniqueID” random string for each comment, and store an MD5 hash of that uniqueID as a cookie in the commenter’s browser.
For extra giggles, you could change the uniqueID (and store a new cookie) every time the commenter edits his comment. But I’m not sure you gain much security-wise by doing so.
No need to keep an extra column if you use Joe’s solution of storing the comment-id along with the MD5 hash of id+SecretString.
I got an idea for a _really_ simple identification system off one of the recent comments on this site (I’m pretty sure it was here).
Just plonk a dead password field (that won’t turn up in the comments) on the form and you’ll be able to identify a user through whatever they type in it. Unless they use the same phrase on every site, noone else will know, and it’ll be easy to identify who’s actually who.
Not the most secure of systems nor one of the most high-tech, but certainly one of the easiest to implement.
Slightly off topic but it does relate to MovableType comments.
Does anyone have a tool or know of a way to batch delete comments from older posts in MovableType?
What I’d like is for MT to highlight those commentators who purposefully don’t allow comments on their own blogs. Perhaps add something sarcastic.
But after a bit of reflection, perhaps autodiscovery of something like this 2ould be nigh on impossible. Come to think of it, there are only two bloggers I can think of offhand in that category.
But being able to add a bit of markup on recognition of a particular commentator would be cool – show a photo or whatever…does it really need a proper FOAF/PGP infrastructure? – Leigh’s autodiscovery bookmarklet gets most of the way :
http://www.ldodds.com/blog/archives/000026.html
How much you need depends on how much you want. You could certainly use the URL field to autodiscover FOAF (from the subset of commenters with FOAF, down to the subset that have an autodiscovery <link> tag), then use that to look for a foaf:weblog (oops, takes me out, since I still haven’t updated mine), then, um, sorry about this step, use that to autodiscover their RSS, and insult anyone who doesn’t point to an RSS 2.0 feed with a <comments> element (shall we insult Sam Ruby, since his mailto: comments URL could be like those people who treat a private mailto: as the equivalent of public comments? probably should, I annoys me when I forget and click it in SharpReader), because I’m afraid that Ben’s wrong about <annotate:reference> being an RSS 1.0 comments element, so the only people with autodiscoverable comments are those who show you the RSS 2.0.
That lets you display a foaf:image and/or a ”Comment from someone who believes in one way communication” header, for anyone who leaves a comment with a URL that points that way. No matter who that person actually is. You only need to add in PGP if you want to actually know whether or not the person leaving the comment is the person who owns the URL where you discovered those things.
Still, I really like the image idea: since Ben’s talking about folding FOAF into TypePad, if he hasn’t already thought of it you should suggest it to him. I don’t know about you, but my Perl skillz would probably result in a grossly inefficient hack that redid the whole autodiscovery and rerequested the image on every rebuild.