Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

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hanno
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Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

Post by hanno »

I'm running several s9y blogs and in order to keep spam manageable I'd like to make sure I'm not flooded with bogus comments for old entries. So I decided that I simply don't want to allow comments for anything older than 30 days, because it's rare that legit comments come in on old entries.

However there's no clean way in s9y to do this. The thing that comes closest is to set "Force comment moderation after how many days" to a number (in my case 30) and to set "What to do with comments when being auto-moderated?" to "reject".

The problem I have with that is that a visitor to my blog will still see a comment form. It will also have a captcha. If a user enters a comment he gets two - somewhat confusing - messages:

"Auto-moderation after X days

Your comment could not be added because comments for this entry have either been disabled, you entered invalid data, or your comment was caught by anti-spam measures."

I believe the X is simply a bug and should probably contain a number.

I find this all far from ideal, because a user who wants to submit a legit comment has no reason to believe this is not possible. He may even try to solve an annoying captcha multiple times. Instead it's obvious what the clean solution would be: If comments aren't allowed and rejected anyway then the form shouldn't be displayed in the first place.

Thoughts?
yellowled
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Re: Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

Post by yellowled »

hanno wrote: Mon Jul 23, 2018 4:45 pmThe problem I have with that is that a visitor to my blog will still see a comment form.
I believe we have a discussion going on about that in the German subforum. It is already possible to avoid that on a template level, but fixing all existing themes seems inefficient; this should be fixed in the core.
hanno wrote: Mon Jul 23, 2018 4:45 pmI believe the X is simply a bug and should probably contain a number.
That's actually the hardcoded value of the lang constant. (I agree that it would be nice to display the actual value there, I'm just not sure how hard that would be. It's a question for Garvin.

YL
garvinhicking
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Re: Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

Post by garvinhicking »

The "X" is actually not substituted, because the idea was that users should not be told what the actual cut-off/limit is. Security by obscurity is not the best thing here, but on the other hand, for a user it might not be required knowledge what the amount of time is, but just that he hit it...?
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hanno
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Re: Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

Post by hanno »

garvinhicking wrote: Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:27 pm The "X" is actually not substituted, because the idea was that users should not be told what the actual cut-off/limit is.
Ok, but if this is the intention I'd formulate it differently. Like it is it looks like a placeholder that wasn't replaced due to a bug.
Maybe writing something like "Auto-moderation for old entries" instead of "Auto-moderation after X days" would be clearer?
thh
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Re: Disabling comments after a certain amount of time

Post by thh »

hanno wrote: Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:42 pmMaybe writing something like "Auto-moderation for old entries" instead of "Auto-moderation after X days" would be clearer?
Yes. See https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/pull/578; it can be discussed further, if necessary.

(I just changed DE and EN, not sure for all the other languages ...)
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