Only Anonymous comments on my weblog

Guest

All comments on my weblog are always anonymous. That led me to investigate the matter and to my utter surprise I found that I don't leave the comment posters with much choice. Either they need to create an account [not practical] or they need to post as anonymous.

How about having a feature where if I allow anonymous comments then I also give the anonymous guy an opportunity to put their name,email and weblog url. If they choose not to put that's fine but atleast I should allow the comment posters to have these basic things.

How could I achieve that?

Thanks.
- Roger

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

Roger -- We advise against allowing anonymous comments for the reason that doing so increases the risk of comment spam, where spammers use an automated system to post numerous comments to your site.

By requiring your readers to create an account, you greatly reduce the potential damages to your blog from automated comment spam.

If you still wish to have anonymous comments, and want your users to be able to leave their name and email address, please read this thread very carefully for some background, some discussion of the pros and cons, and finally for a workaround to our system which would allow you to do what you describe:

http://forums.blogharbor.com/viewtopic.php?t=567

I am going to repost this technique below, with corrections for spelling errors, some changes due to our recent interface update, etc.

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

We're going to make changes to the article template and the comments template in order to allow anonymous users who have not logged in with a Reader Account to sign their name to their comments. BlogHarbor advises against allowing Anonymous Comments due to the increased the risk of comment spam. Use this technique at your own risk!

This is a slightly more advanced topic, but most of our users should be able to follow along with this. First read this article on modifying your CSS template for a little background on the process of modifying your templates, and if you understand that article you should be able to follow these steps.

What we are going to do is change the comment forms to add 2 additional fields, Name and Email Address. Using Javascript, we are going to automatically include the content of those fields into the comment body when the user submits their comment. This makes it easy for users who have not logged in with a Reader Account to sign their name to their comments. Then we are going to modify the comment output so that the Username or Nickname from the Reader Account only appears for comments that are not made anonymously.

Here we go:

Login to your Blog Admin Control Panel through the Login page.

Go to the Settings & Security tab and click on the link to Advanced. From the Advanced Settings page, scroll down until you see the row labeled Anonymous Comments and make sure the "Allow anonymous Reader comments" checkbox on the right is checked. If not, check it and click on Save Settings at the bottom of the page.

Click on the Look and Feel tab, then the Templates subtab.

Now you see a list of the Templates you can customize. We are going to customize the article template, which controls the look of an article when it appears by itself (on its permanent link) and not on a category page, so click Edit in the row that begins with the word article.

Now you'll be on a page listing the current article templates (there will probably be only one). Go all the way to the bottom of the page and click the Customize button.

Almost there: Click the Go button to Copy the Standard template to the staging area. You'll come to the page where you can customize the article template. Sorry it took so long to get here, we will work on making it easier to get to.

Now let's make some changes to the Staging Template Content. Take a look at the very bottom of the textarea, you will see this:

Guest · Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 11:45 am Post subject:

John,

Thanks for the fast turn around and for such detailed explanation. I'll give it a shot. I understand why users are advised against allowing anonymous comment. I have been using your tool for 3 months and I was spammed only once. I don't have a data but I believe only the strong followers of my blog will create an account. So until spamming becomes really an issue for me I'll let people post anonymous comments and hence the request.

Once again thanks a lot. Support provided by your team is one of the best I've seen.

.Roger

roger_rustin · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 10

I inted to implement this feature in my blog. I have two questions.

1) Will the email address be encoded in ASCII so that to the bots the real email address is not revealed .

2) I don't inted to use right away but if the spam becomes an issue will it be possible to install CAPTCHA or something similar for validation.

I understand all the merits of not having anonymouns comments but at the same time I also belive that asking all your reads to have an account is not a practical solution to the problem.

Thanks.
- Roger

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

Roger, let me reiterate that the technique explained above is not supported by us. I did show how a user who prefers another method of commenting one method that might be accomplished, but as noted earlier:

BlogHarbor advises against allowing Anonymous Comments due to the increased the risk of comment spam. Use this technique at your own risk!

So in general, I'm saying that we threw this technique out there for folks who like to take a risk, but can't guarantee that it will work, that it's a smart thing to do, nor can we really answer any support questions about it.

That being said...

1) Will the email address be encoded in ASCII so that to the bots the real email address is not revealed.

Good question, but the answer is no this technique was not created to do that. If I can figure out how that would be done, I will show you or give you some pointers.

2) I don't inted to use right away but if the spam becomes an issue will it be possible to install CAPTCHA or something similar for validation.

I can't see any way to install a CAPTCHA on your blog, but that's pretty much the reason for requiring authentication and reader accounts for commenting. If you require authentication for reader comments you decrease the likelihood for automated attacks against your comments.

Further, using authentication for commenting enables us to assist you in deleting any abusive comments from automated systems and prevent them from happening again. It is much more problematic for us prevent comments from anonymouse or more properly unauthenticated users.

I understand all the merits of not having anonymouns comments but at the same time I also belive that asking all your reads to have an account is not a practical solution to the problem.

To be precise, we do in fact have anonymous comments. We simply do not provide for comment attribution without authentication. In the Revolution the cry was No Taxation without Representation, our rally cry is No Attribution without Authentication! Wink

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

I found this page:

http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html

which contained some Javascript which performs what is called entity conversion, which is converting an ASCII character such as the letter j into a special HTML code called a character entity which looks like this: j . Some people feel that it is safer to place your email address on a web page using this character conversion, for the reason that it will be more protected against spammers who are attempting to harvest email addresses from web pages.

With that in mind, here is a modified form of the code noted above for insertion into your article template which will perform the entity conversions on the commenter's email address. Remember that in order for the email address to be displayed at all, you must set your blog to Allow HTML in comments from the Settings & Security >Publishing > Advanced section of your control panel.

roger_rustin · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 10

John thanks for all your support.

My diappoinntment on three fronts:

1)

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

My diappoinntment on three fronts:

There are many ways to handle commenting and protection against abuse. Our system leans toward the authentication of identity side. Other systems out there might take a different approach.

We realize that some folks might prefer one way and others might prefer another way. That's why we offer a free trial, so you can check out our service for yourself and see if you like it. There will be pluses and minuses to every system. If you don't think our minuses are outweighed by our pluses and BlogHarbor is a service worth paying for, then it was a free trial and you haven't spent a penny, hopefully you learned something and you can go out there and find another service that suits you better.

Roger, let me reiterate that the technique explained above is not supported by us. Crying or Very sad

Again, to be clear, I am speaking of the 'attribution by anonymous commenter' workaround explained above. You are free to use this method of course, but is only presented to you here as an exercise in what's possible when customizing our templates and not as a "feature" of our system.

Email encoding is not supported from the grass root.

I am not sure what you mean by "from the grass root."

It means even if someone does sign up for the comments that person is opening himself/herself to the spam.

That is not exactly correct. Your user profile is protected from spams by, of course, authentication. You configure elements of your user profile such as your email address to be visible to the Public, Friends only or Private. The information in your user profile will be displayed to other users depending on who they are and what you have decided they should be able to see.

The default setting is that your email address is shown to Friends only. It will not be visible to automated robots. The default is that your email address would only be shown to usernames you explicitly put on your Friends list and would only be shown to those users when they have authenticated their identity by logging in.

[CAPTCHA] is supported in roller and other tools too. Is there a plan to support this in future?

For those who do not know, CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", is a means to protect a web form from abuse by automated systems. By displaying an image containing letters, numbers, and or words which the user is required to enter into the field on the form, the site can be sure that the form was filled in by a human and not a computer performing an automated task such as comment spam.

A CAPTCHA is necessary for weblogging systems which do not provide authentication mechanisms, protecting your blog against abuse by detecting automated systems. We do not provide CAPTCHA at this time, but as I am sure you knew I was going to say, we suggest you protect your blog from abuse by automated systems by requiring your readers to sign in before they comment.

roger_rustin · Joined: 14 Dec 2004 Posts: 10

thanks for the detailed explanation. Really appreciate it.

- Roger

ojhowden64 · Joined: 05 Jul 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Australia

Thanks for the prompt reply on the how to get more traffic bit, has been helpful.

When I first made the adjustments suggested I got a syntax error on line 147, did some playing around to figure what I had missed or added incorrectly and now seems to be working.

Will also take on board the comments on, nicer less commercial info to be on the blog and see what comes from that.

Will make a point of also including in any emails I sedn to people including my blog address as another way of going about it.

Once again thanks for the help and keep on bloggin.
_________________
Thanks

Owen Howden

zoli · Joined: 27 Jun 2005 Posts: 108

John, I believe we have a catch 22 situation as far as leaving comments:
- the mod you listed above allows for anonymous comments, while capturing (optional) email info.. so far so good, but is not the recommended method, however:

- if i disallow anonymous commenting, the reader is promted to enter his/her registration info, but if he is unregistered, there is no link to take him/her to registering.

IMHO, unless a link is provided right there to acount creation, this method is a dead end. I thought I would simply resolve it by entering the http://login.blogharbor.com/users/index.cgi/cmd=signup to whatever template drives the comment section, but I did not find it .... would appreciate your help.

Thanks a lot,
Zoli
[url][/url]

john · Site Admin Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 3434

if i disallow anonymous commenting, the reader is promted to enter his/her registration info, but if he is unregistered, there is no link to take him/her to registering.

I would say that this thread was more intended to show what it possible with regards to customization of your weblog rather than to define a fixed or all-encompassing solution.

With that in mind, there are many options with respect to the approach outlined above. One of which, as you point out, is providing a link to sign up for a Reader Account for an unauthenticated user.

You should be able to use this as a starting point for where you want to go:

tigersi · Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 174

Hi John,

I just tried to modify my blog with the code you provided above. When I did a test on on an article (shown at the URL below), it still shows as "Anonymous." I signed in as roaringtiger though. The content is "test" and "test2" in two separtate comments.

http://bigcatchronicles.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/17/1040668.html#comments

Also, can you suggest a modification that would allow a reader to insert their own blog's URL. I think that might be more beneficial than email.

Also, a way to show that none of the fields is required.
_________________
Thanks!
Kathy (aka, Roaring Tiger)
http://bigcatchronicles.blogharbor.com

tigersi · Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 174

Hi John,

Forget my request. I just had 5 poker comment spammers so I'm already turning off anonymous comments.
_________________
Thanks!
Kathy (aka, Roaring Tiger)
http://bigcatchronicles.blogharbor.com