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Off and on for several years I've been part of a local political forum using Blogger.
Usually a new topic will be posted every week, and group of thirty or forty enthusiastic people will generate fifty to a hundred comments.
The challenge is that we're overwhelmed by Anons, who go off wildly in all directions, dwell endlessly on personal vendettas, and lately get far too close to outright libel of other people. Consensus in the past has been that allowing Anons is good thing, but we're realizing that we really need to be able to moderate their comments.
What we really want is something simple enough for non-experts, not needing our own hosting, that will allow us to:
- Post topics for discussion
- Let "named" posters comment without a delay for moderation.
- Allow Anon comments but hold them for moderation.
The good thing about Blogger is that it doesn't seem to get blasted with comment spam, as seems to be the case with WordPress blogs for instance. The bad thing is that your only choice with Anons is either all-in, or all-out. Either you cut them out entirely, or you give them full rein to wreak havok.
We'd appreciate being pointed to something similar to Blogger, but just a little bit more featured, and not part some large environment like Google Groups or Facebook. Although letting people log in using Facebook, Twitter, or Google IDs (or Open ID, whatever) is good too.
I'm in the process of checking out Weebly and whatever else Google throws at me, but am hoping that the Soylent community can suggest something more appropriate that can be up and running with minimal fuss.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday November 21 2016, @02:13AM
Unfortunately, the general trend is to exclude ACs on basically every forum; there are very few blogging platforms in general that let you do what you want out of the box. Rehash (the code base that powers SN) comes very close to your requirements, except we don't have a way to send AC comments to a penality box, they get score 0, and then can be modded up or down. You can change the default visibility fairly easily.
From an administrative perspective you can do the following:
- Assign editors unlimited mod points or delete posts (normally disabled here, but its just a config option to bring it back)
- AC posting can be enabled/disabled on a per-article basis
- Divide articles into topics and nexuses
- Provide independent blogging in the forum of journals
- Automatic karma based modding; ACs get banned if there IP or subnet get hits with -25 karma (configurable).
- Articles locked after 30 days to prevent retroactive spam
- OpenID support (which supports FB. This is disabled on production, but it used to work historically)
We've discussed hosting instances as rehash as a business model for this site, but we didn't think there would be a lot of uptake on it. If you'd be interested though, I'd be willing to float the idea and see if we're still willing to consider it and for what we can do for a reasonable monthly cost. Rehash allows multi-site mode where the same code base can host multiple sites on multiple DB instances on the same infrastructure. That would get you IPv6 support, DNSSEC, HSTS, and email gateways, as well as the ability to load your own themes. You'd have to deal with the fact our mobile support is basically in the toliet, but patches welcome!
As for other choices, I want to say Geeklog could do what you want, but I don't know of any managed hosting services off the top of my head.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday November 21 2016, @03:24PM
Have you spun up a test of this yet?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday November 21 2016, @10:59PM
I haven't, but I could try it on dev relatively easily if I can get some indication its worth the effort.
Still always moving