Named Commenting (GSoC 2010) Project Proposal/Ideas

[dostieer]

As explained in this spec, the Named commenting level should allow users who do not have an account with Dreamwidth the ability to comment without being anonymous, but without registering.

Most modern blogging sites have some sort of Named Commenting form, usually asking for a Name and a URL to attach to the name.

Basics
The Named commenting level should ask for:

• Name (Pseudonym)
  
• URL
  

The Named commenting level could ask for:

• E-mail (and send direct replies to the Named commenter's email)
  

Frontend
It would be most intuitive for users if the Anonymous commenting level and the Named commenting level were kept separate, to ensure no confusion over whether the user is posting with an entered Name and URL or if they are simply posting anonymously.

Journal Settings
The journal owner must be able to decide on a journal or per-entry basis if they want to force a commentor to provide a pseudonym or prevent pseudonyms from being used. If pseudonyms are prevented from being used, I assume anonymous commenting would also be disallowed on that entry/journal? I'm confused as to when pseudonyms would want to be disallowed but anonymous commenting allowed. Some clarification would be much appreciated.

E-mail System
If the e-mail system is created, it will be important to make sure that a commenter wants to receive e-mail about his/her comment. The e-mail should include a link to subscribe to further e-mails for that entry, and it should provide a link to unsubscribe from receiving e-mails about replies.

Should this unsubscribe them from all e-mails related to Named commenting from Dreamwidth or should it only unsubscribe them from that entry? The system could be abused (if the abuser knew a person's email) if the e-mails are only unsubscribed from that entry. It seems like unsubscribing them from all further e-mails about direct replies would make more sense, but what if they want to resubscribe at a later point?

Possibilities
Depending on how the project wants to advance, an automatically generated icon could be created for a Named commenter as described in the spec, but it would be most important to get everything else working first.

Comments

[zarhooie]

As an extra shiny thing, I'd love to see options for the anonymous commenting icon, similar to the way there are certain moodthemes that are default on the site. A user could select one set and a random icon from that set would be assigned to the comment.

[dostieer]

The journal owner could even select a set of icons that would be used when a Named commenter posts, selecting a random icon from the set.

[azurelunatic]

The geometric and monster icon sets that are sometimes used in WordPress are a good place to start, if they're free to be used on other projects; Dreamwidth's users can then generate more (I think a Dreamsheep set would be very popular).

[azurelunatic]

I have seen people reporting (both on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal) that they would allow pseudonymous commenters but not fully anonymous ones, so, since some users would treat them separately, they should be treated separately in the code.

[azurelunatic]

Dreamwidth's comment security settings are historically from the least to the most open, with no ability to pick out single classes of commenter that are of disparate openness settings.

Currently, one can allow:

All (anonymous, all OpenID, all users, all users-and-OpenID-on-access-list)

Registered users (OpenID that have registered an email address, all users, all users-and-OpenID-on-access-list)

Access only (all users-and-OpenID-on-access-list)

None


Adding pseudonymous commenters would most likely insert a "All named commenters" level, including pseudonymous and OpenID users who have not registered email addresses but excluding anonymous, between "all" and "registered users".

I am sure that some users would also prefer to only allow commenting from pseudonymous users with confirmed email addresses, if this could be reasonably implemented (confirm email address once per browser session, leave comments queued in some way or screened before email address is confirmed), and perhaps class this with the Registered Users comment security level.



For actual use cases where anonymous commenting would be allowed but pseudonymous commenting would not be, there are a *very few* journal-based games where the rules are that only anonymous comments may be left, and the journal owner will delete any comments that are left with usernames attached. However, since these games are accomplished by allowing all comments and then (after comments are left) enforcing the no-names rule, I do not feel that there is likely to be a need to write code to allow anonymous but disallow pseudonymous.

[zvi]

When the spec was being originally written, IIRC, there were people who did not want to allow pseudonymous but wanted to allow anonymous, because they didn't want to, at its most basic, encourage sockpuppetting.

I don't think it's a very high priority, but I do think that there are people who would use the option, were it given to them.