Comment Management

Comments can be posted by website readers under articles or forums, if the zine configuration allows it.

Security and Comment Policies

Enabling/Disabling Comments

Every zine and/or article has a comment policy which is one of:

forbidden: no one may post comments here
public: anyone may post comments
members: authenticated members of the site may post comments

The comment policy is taken from (in order): the article comment policy (if set), the reference zine's comment policy (if set), the default policy for the zine type (if set), and lastly the default global comment policy. The last two are set in the Zine configuration file; the others are set on the configuration panel for a particular zine/article.

To disable commenting under a particular zine or article, set the comment policy on that one article to forbidden. Other zines and articles will not be affected.

Public Comments

Public comments can be posted by anyone at any time. They can enter any name in to the "From" field. The following configuration parameters control how public comments are handled:

allow_anonymous: if true, accept comments with no "From" setting; otherwise users must enter a name.
anonymous_name: if no "From" setting, use this name (default is "Anonymous").
shrink_anonymous_comments: if true, then public comments are shrunk down to a link. Readers must click through to read them.
mark_unauthenticated_comments: if true, then public comments are marked with extra text to mark them as unauthenticated.
unauthenticated_comment_mark: the text used to mark unauthenticated authors (default is '(?)')
use_captcha: unauthenticated commenters must solve a captcha to post. This reduces automatic spamming abuse.

Member Comments

To post a comment in a zine or article with a "member" comment policy, the user must be logged in to the website. Their name is automatically filled in to the comment form, and there is no need to solve a captcha.

The configuration setting editable_author can be set to true to allow members to change the From field of their post. The comment is still connected to their member record, even if they change the visible author settting.

The configuration setting withhold_name causes a blanked From field to display as "(name withheld)". Otherwise an empty From field is simply treated as no data, and the user name or login ID will be used instead.

Non-members may still see links/buttons to post comments, but will receive an error message if they attempt to use them.

Comment Indexes

Comments can be indexed in all the same ways that articles can be indexed. Some index formats are particularly suited to comments:

Index Type	Description
Deep	All comments are displayed in a flat index.
Threaded	All comments displayed, indented under their parent comments.
Semi-threaded	The opening comment of each thread is summarized in the main index. Following this comment takes you to a fully-threaded display of that thread.
Exploding	Like Threaded, but the comment levels can be expanded and collapsed dynamically by clicking on buttons.

Comment index types are set in the configuration file, using the following parameters:

comment.indextype: system-wide default
TYPE.comment.indextype: default for a specific zine type

For forums only, you can also set the index type for a particular forum in the zine configuration screen. (For other zine types, this setting affects article indexes only.)

Examples

Using the indexing rules for zines, you can devise a variety of formats for your comment indexes. Here are some examples to help you understand how to do this:

Show full comments under blog articles:

blog.comment.indexformat = full

Show links to comments under blog articles:

blog.comment.indexformat = brief

Sequential index of blog comments:

blog.comment.indextype = basic
blog.comment.indexsort = date

Numbered blog comments:

blog.comment.indextype = numbered
blog.comment.indexsort = date

Fully threaded forum, with most recent threads on top

forum.comment.indextype = threaded
forum.comment.indexsort = reverse-date

Fully threaded blog discussions (a la Slashdot)

e-zine.comment.indextype = threaded
e-zine.comment.indexsort = date

Semi-threaded forum with tabular presentation (a la PHPBB)

forum.comment.indextype = semi-threaded

Comment Input & Output

The following configuration settings affect the entry of comments:

editable_author - members can change the From field, if true. This only affects the displayed "From" value. Comments are still tied to the member's user record.
quote_parent - on replies, the parent comment will automatically be quoted, using conventional plain-text email quoting methods.
default_subject - on top-level comments, a subject field will automatically be defined, if true.
edit_my_comment_timeout - if set to a positive integer, a user will have that many seconds after posting a comment to re-edit it. This is meant for proof-reading and corrections, not for changing the meaning of your message after others have already read and replied to it, so it is best to keep the time limit to a few minutes (eg. 180 seconds).

Comments are entered in plain-text format by default.

Smileys (emoticons) may be entered in their conventional text forms, eg. :-).

Limited HTML is accepted, but structural HTML (eg. DIVs and TABLE markup) will not be.

Display of Comments

The following configuration settings affect the display of comments:

remove_quote_char - the ">" prefix on each quoted line will be removed, if this is set on. This can be handy if you use CSS to style the quoted section and want a cleaner display of the text. Note that only the first level of quoting is removed, so if a quote is quoted, the second (and higher) levels of quote characters will remain in the text.
body_strut_size - if set to a positive integer value, the comment body will include a "strut" of that many pixels height. This effectively sets a minimum height of the body region of the content, which can be useful in pseudo-table layouts where the poster info is shown in a cell to the left of the comment itself. Heights of 50-100 suffice in most cases.
emoticons - if set on, text emoticons will be replaced with graphical equivalents, as shown below.

Line breaks in the comment are preserved by the addition of <br> tags.

Quoted sections are wrapped in <div> tags of class "ZineQuote", allowing special CSS rules to be applied to quotes.

Moderation

By default comments go live immediately. (That is, their default status is "active".) If inappropriate comments are entered by site readers, the webmaster can manually delete or edit the comments after the fact.

To vet all comments before they go live, comment moderation must be enabled. To do this, change the default status of a comment to some other value, as follows:

# by default, all new comments are pending moderation
comment.status = pending

# new forum comments are pre-approved, however
forum.comment.status = active

New comments will be created with the default status. If the status is not "active", the comments will not be visible to the public. Furthermore, as soon as an non-active comment is entered into the the system, the moderator will be notified with an email message. This message includes links to accept or reject the comment.

When viewing comments in an administrator view (eg. the Zine control panel), all articles and comments are flagged with a graphical icon indicating their status. Inactive comments include extra tools to accept or reject them.

In addition to using the moderation links/tools, you can always change the status of particular articles/comments using the configuration page.