roy

Here are a bunch of random observations about commenting and battling comment spam within the Tabulas system. Or rather, some features I've been developing for the new version of Tabulas that will hopefully give owners more control over who posts in their journals.

Most of these are targetted at anonymous commenters; I don't think there have been any cases where registered users have been overtly spamming other journals.

The first big feature I'm rolling out is "autolocking" of entries. Entries that are older than a certain date threshold will automatically locked for commenting; this is ignored if you have a 'stickied' entry. This should help battle spammers posting random comments in old entries to boost PageRank.

The second set of features I'm rolling out is related closely to 'anonymous' commenting... I will allow anonymous commenters to 'verify' their anonymous accounts via e-mail quickly so they get cookied into the system. This way they don't have to give any really important information to Tabulas, but they don't have to keep putting in their anonymous information.

I will also allow Tabulas owners to set "verification" levels. "Verification" levels will require anonymous users to "verify" their comments from the e-mail addresses they post before they are posted publicly; Tabulas owners will also be able to manually verify any comments if they wish. The verification levels will be set at two thresholds: owners can either require comment verification from any comments from anonymous users who have not verified their e-mail addresses, or they be more stringent and require autoverification of all anonymous commenters.

Thoughts?