1 Hmm.  I need to change the comment form so that it automatically comes up with a "You must register to comment." message if the user isn't already logged in.

Let's make sure that the feature at least works...

2 Okay, it does work (I was pretty sure I'd tested it previously) and it will block the spammers, but I need to clean up the messages a bit.

3 I'm not sure I've logged in from this computer. Still, I think it's a good move on your part, Steven.

Update: Wasn't logged in, got "%s have been disabled." I'm sure Pixy will straighten that out!

4 Yep.  I've fixed a couple of messages, and I'm making a change to the comment form so that it shows a message instead of the edit box if you can't comment.

5 The registration process never sent the confirmation email it claimed was necessary, but it worked, so I can't complain.

-j

6 Yeah, I turned off the confirmation step because too many messages got lost in spam filters or whatever.

7 Just testing to see if this works.  And frankly, I'm amazed the spammers took that long. . .

8 testing.....

9 Methinks sending you to a page to log in might be more seamless.

It looks like it will let me put in my real blog URL ... good.

10

Methinks sending you to a page to log in might be more seamless.

Or provide a login form in place of the comment form, and then bring up the comment form once you log in.  Yup.

11 Oh well, I was looking for somewhere to store a little data anyhow. Maybe I'll even post something, someday.

12 Commenting to verify registration.

13 Let's see here, will it let me change my name from the registered name? And can I post my real blog? It looks like I can. Nice

14

Pixy: THAT's interesting.

I took a look in the administration comments page, and Mark's post is listed as coming from "Mark". Fact is, I don't have the slightest idea what login name he used, and it doesn't appear there's any way for me to find out.

I certainly don't want to do so for Mark, but supposing someone was annoying and I wanted to ban them. If they've changed their posting name, then how am I supposed to determine their login name in order to add them to the ban list?

15

Pixy: In the administration "Comments" page, the posting name column should change somewhat. Right now you've got it so that they link to the same things they link to here.

That should change to this: if a user is not logged in, the name should not be a link. If the user is logged in, the name should be a link to the mee.nu info page for the login that was used. So for the entry above, "Mark" links to Kaedrin in this thread, but in the administration "Comments" page, "Mark" should link to the real login ID he used.

16 You do need to be able to see the link even if they're not logged in, because just the link might be spam.  But yeah, to manage users you kind of need to be able to identify the user...

I'll do some work on this over the next couple of days, but it will probably take a few iterations to reach something that has all the information needed but is still manageable.

17 If they've linked to spam, I can see that in the comment thread and the sidebar. I don't need to see it in the administration frame.

18 Definitely agree with comment 10.

19 Steven - yeah... ish.  It's best if you can see all the information needed for moderating comments in the moderation screen itself.  But I won't hold up improvements while trying for perfection; I'll have an update soon.

Jim - I was just thinking about that some more, and the problem there is that the templates are completely user-controlled, and that opens things up for phishing scams.  So it's best if users are redirected to mee.nu itself for the login, then redirected back to the comment page.

20 Testing...

21 Looks like you finally got it to work.