Journal Comments Now Available
Wednesday, 07 February 2007, 12:48 p.m. CST
I've just finished activating visitor comments for journal entries. To post a comment you need to click on the title of an entry to get to its permanent page. At the moment anybody can post a comment. I'm looking into safeguards to prevent spam from filling up our site like it did before when we had an open forum. If you are interested you can add comments to this journal entry to try things out.
Suggestions are welcome.
Comments
commented, on February 7, 2007 at 5:09 p.m.:
I was able to accomplish a bit more on the comments system. The author can decide to not allow comments at all and comment entry is automatically ended when a journal entry is more than 30 days old.
Also, each poster's internet address is logged and the flag of their country of origin is displayed next to their name.
commented, on February 11, 2007 at 11 a.m.:
Congratulations on opening up this functionality. Some people are not keen on dropping their email address for all to use. Hopefully the visitors will add value content for all to learn from. Thanks again for you efforts.
commented, on February 12, 2007 at 7:24 a.m.:
Is the Journal for posting information about recent trips? If so how do you do it?
commented, on February 12, 2007 at 8:26 a.m.:
@Jeff
I'm going to see how long until the spam-bots finds the open comments and start posting their junk. My preference is to keep the comments open and not require an email address but I doubt it will last for long. I'm evaluating our options for providing user accounts or some other method of keeping the bots out. I feel the pain of constantly providing personal information but it has to be weighed as a cost for keeping the quality of overall site content as high as possible.
@Pat
The intent of the journal is for the club to post information to its members and the public. A year ago we had an open forum for anybody to start their own conversational threads. Unfortunately the forum software that was chosen was so widely used on the Internet that the spammers pretty much took that over. Since then I've moved the web site to my own server running my own software. It takes a bit longer to provide new features since the only shared code I use has to be analyzed for security failures and then carefully integrated into the site.
I'll be meeting with some of the club officers very soon to discuss our options for moving forward with the site. Personally, I'd like to keep the site as open as possible to provide an easy means for fly fishing enthusiasts to talk and share.
There are a few features for the site that are under development. I'll make them public as soon as they become available. In the mean time keeping checking back and let us know how well things are working for you.
Comments are closed
Comments are closed after journal entries have been posted for more than 30 days.

First post!