[wp-hackers] "commenter" user role

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 5, 2010, at 8:37 PM, John O'Nolan wrote:
> It's not an important consideration so much as an annoyance / inconvenience. I hate system emails at the best of times - and the one mentioned would just be a pain.

That's cool.

> Is there a reason why we couldn't just write the name to the DB once, and then ignore the "name" field in the future if the email address already exists in the DB?

Because the first time could have been a typo?

On another note, I worry about context.  Let's say I ran a company in the past and left a lot of comments using my gmail address but with my prior company's URL.  Now I've sold that company and started a new one; should the links on the old posts all change to be for my new URL?  Maybe not, that would change the context of some of those comments.

Even more significant, what if someone wants to use the same gmail address but use different names and different URLs for different sites; i.e. for educational credentials someone comments on post in their field of study they might want to add "PhD" but when commenting on a post about sports them might not want to appear pompous so they don't include "PhD."  Also, they would include a URL to their business site in the first and a URL to their personal blog about sports in the second case.  I think name and URL really need to be captured for each comment.

That said, let's explore the following.  If we have a user account keyed on email address where all our comments could roll up then it would be possible to allow a user to maintain their own WordPress site that could aggregate all their comments from all different sites and even be able to update name and URL for all comments (with approval from each site admin, of course.)  This would provide a sort of distributed Disqus/IntenseDebate functionality but built into WordPress.  That would be fun to architect, but would only catch on if built into core. FWIW.

-Mike