[wp-hackers] GSOC - comment moderation proposal

[Jeremy Clarke]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Eitan Adler <eitanadlerlist at gmail.com> wrote:
> These are preliminary milestones and are likely to change as I work on
> the project.
> Documentation will be done while I am writing the code.
> 1) Create api for changing parent of comment
> 2) Adding option in the admin screen for changing comment parents
> 3) Add notification option to poster if he opted receive replies to his post
> 4) Add threaded comments to comments in moderation
> 5) Add method of re-parenting through the xml-rpc api
> 6) Add method to request all sub-comments

If you're looking to improve the comment editing process I have a
fairly major request that seems like it would fit in and give you some
productive work: Add user-awareness to comment editing screens.

Currently if you are logged in when you leave a comment WP saves your
user id in the comment record and treats your user account as the
author rather than depending on the other data in the comments record.
This has various effects at display time such as adding the 'byuser'
and 'author-$authorname' classes onto the comment. The problem is that
if you leave a comment while logged out WP does not record your user,
even if you enter the same email address as is used on the account
(which makes sense as otherwise strangers could enter your email
address and masquerade as you, fancy 'byuser' styles and all).

What's needed is a way to edit a comment after its posted to add a
user-relationship. This should be present in both the individual
comment editing screen and in the comment moderation list. I'm not
sure of the ideal UI for it but it should probably deactivate the
email/name/url fields if a user is set to make it clear that the
user's profile info will be used instead. If a comment is edited it
should also predict the 'non-logged-in-author' use-case by checking if
the email is in the users db and offering to convert the comment into
a user-comment.

 In the current setup the only way to control the user-author of a
comment is by editing the database which is insane. Adding
user-awareness to the comment edit/moderation screens would also have
the bonus effect of teaching users about the user-awareness of
comments while they are moderating. I think there is a general lack of
awareness of the user-awareness of comments due to the fact that
editing a comment makes it seem like only the email and stated user
name are recorded.

If it fits in with your work a related feature would be to show a
warning to non-logged-in commenters who use the email of a user on the
site. Something like "Woah dude, that email belongs a user on this
site! Maybe you should [log in] so your comment is recorded properly".

Not sure if there is a Trac ticket about this issue or not, but there
probably should be.

-- 
Jeremy Clarke | http://jeremyclarke.org
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org