Architected Futures™

Tools and strategies ... for boiling the ocean

User Comments Strategy

General

On an overall basis there are a couple if issues related to comments that go across the board.

  1. Spam Management - One of our primary concerns, unfortunately, is comment spam. This comes in a variety of forms. Some of it is simply people who want to spam sites by posting spurious comments. Another is the way some folks use link embeds on comments to create SEO value for their own site by posting links to their site as part of comments. The comments tend to be bland, vanilla say-nothing statements, but are included with a back-link to their site to build inbound link references. Our general approach to both of these problems is the use of the Mollom module. The site has not been up long and there is little actual history with this process. What we are measuring against here is the Akismet processing we are using on the ArchitectedFutures.info site which is working very well.
  2. There need to be facilities built in to the site that are aimed at encouragement and feedback for people who participate properly.
    1. The Comment Notify module has been implemented to allow people to get email tracking of comments on their comments. If a second person makes a reply to a comment, the first person is able to get an email notice. This encourages the first person to come back and keep up the dialog.
  3. There needs to be an emphasized disclosure in the policies area that comments can be assimilated into content without attribution. However, there should also be an acknowledgement, at the discretion of the site owner, where people who have contributed to the site (money or ideas) will be acknowledged in some manner. This may include some credit notification on an acknowledgement page. (People so named may opt-out if desired.)
  4. There needs to be a method whereby comments can be pruned over time. The desire is to be able to physically retain them in context, but cut them out in terms of interruption of flow for the comments that have not been pruned.
    1. There are at least a couple of reasons for this:
      1. Comments which make it to publication, but which then need to be removed due to complaints, etc.
      2. Comments which become obsolete because they discuss some aspect of the content, which once changed, the comment becomes moot. (Note, this may be on Book entries, etc where the text gets updated and does not just stay in original form as a blog entry or article.)
    2. This was the subject of a discussion on a Drupal LinkedIn forum. Two suggestions were:
      1. Unpublish the comments. They are retained in the system and can be viewed by administrators, but routine visitors can not see them.
      2. Add a field to the comments that can be set when the comment is to be pruned. Eliminate the normal comment display and replace it with two tabs on thge node display. Tab 1 would show the 'unpruned' comments, along the lines of a Talk(?) page. Tab 2 would show the 'pruned' comments and might only be visible to selected people.
    3. Starting to do some research on how to do this, and examination of comment templates brought up the additional design concepts:
      1. Some sites have a community comment collapse feature where certain comments are flagged by the community and either by algorithm or by administrative action comments are collapsed. They still appear in the list, but they are reduced down to a small entry that basically states "comment collapsed by community, press expand button to see comment."
      2. This, in a lot of cases, might address the main desire to remove the actual text of the comment from view so that the remaining comments flow better; but still leave the comment material available if someone wanted to see it. This shoud be able to be done by putting one or more fields on the comment which are only visible to an administrative type, or are acted on as a result of algorithm. If the fields are set, a template modification can either eliminate or hide the comment. If done with CSS, the content will be there to see, but be hidden and unobtrusive for most users.
      3. This concept can be used in conjunction with the "unpublish" idea and the separate view idea as another way to provide flexibility in how the content is presented. Inappropriate material might be 'unpublished' but allowed to be shown on an administrators tab. A 'talk' page might have two formats: (1) The current conversation, and (2) a complete historical conversation.

​Design

The approach to comments will be to implement comments in a couple of design schemes:

  1. The first scheme is a routine comments section that appears at the bottom of a post. People who wish to comment on the post can post comments using a form that appears at the bottom of the post. This is the normal form of comment display. It is the format that will be used for:
    1. Blog postings
    2. Article postings
  2. The second scheme is the use of a Discussion page which is designed to emulate the manner ion which comments are gathered in Wikipedia. There is no comment form at the bottom of a posting, but there may be a link to "Add Comment." Using the link will take the viewer to a discussion page with an "Add Comment" form. For those wishing to simply read comments, there is a "Discussion" tab on the posting. This feature is supplied by the Talk module (currently [06/25] in Beta4 release). Comments on the "Discussion" page should still look like comments and should retain the 'threaded' characteristic. This is in distinction to Wikipedia where the Discussion page is also an edited page where people may write over each other. It is the format that will be used for:
    1. Book pages
    2. Tools Catalog entries
    3. Bibliography entries
    4. Glossary Terms
  3. The third scheme may be either an alternative or an addition to one of the first two schemes. This scheme involves the use of Forums as comment and discussion vehicles for selected topics. What we need to do is to provide a link to a discussion forum if one has been started. It would also be nice to be able to automatically create a new forum if one does not already exist. There needs to be a clear distinction for the reader the difference between discussions held in a Forum and discussion that are simply comments moved to a Talk page.  (There is a Drupal module called Discuss This, but the module is currently [6/25] D6 only.)
    1. An alternative to the Discuss This module, pending someone producing a D7 version, may be to simply create a link field which links to a current discussion. If the link field does not exist, a template modification may be able to make is disappear. If it does exist, it can link to the correct discussion topic. If this is done my the author of the content (we should probably be talking about Book entires and stuff here) then we should be assured of getting people linked to the right discussions.

Fields

Comment fields are adjusted on a content type-by-content type basis. To add a field to a comment for all content types, it needs to be added one-by-one to the comment fields for each content type.

Theming

Front End Drupal [Hogbin2009] on pp231-234 discusses theming of comments and talks about the template files involved in the process. It also talks about some additional interesting customization:

  • "Comments by Me"
  • "Comments by the original article author"
  • Status related information

Templates for the comments are found in \modules\comment.

comment.tpl.php

This is the main template for control of the output of all comments for a particular node. It has very good internal documentation and identifies classes that can be used to format some special cases like those mentioned above (my comments, author comments, etc.). For some things like that, only CSS is needed. This file is has been overridden by Omega, but this shows the original base.

comment-folded.tpl.php

This was used to manage folded (hidden) comments. It was deprecated in D7.

comment-wrapper.tpl.php

Detail wrapper for generation of HTML for comments. Does not appear to have Omega override.

New Templates for Drupal 7

The core template documentation and the Drupal documentation for D7 includes some information about the deprecation of the comment-folded.tpl.php file and the introduction of a series of new files which allow comment theming by content type.

comment--node-NODETYPE.tpl.php

This new template is an override to comment.tpl.php for the node type identified by NODETYPE. This provides an alternative method for node type specific theming.

comment-wrapper--node-NODETYPE.tpl.php

This new template is an override to comment-wrapper.tpl.php for the node type identified by NODETYPE.

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