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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: 2) by Geotti on Monday November 21 2016, @03:21AM
Guest comments will not be approved automatically, and must be manually approved by a site moderator to appear on the page, regardless of whether Pre-Moderation has been enabled. (https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/832187-guest-commenting)
Enjoy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:37AM
Counterpoint: Don't use Disqus; it's a shambling horror.
I know nothing about running a site using Disqus for comments -- my experience is entirely as a user. But I've never used another comment system that breaks inexplicably so often.
And it has delightful quirks like, if you block a user, and then that user gets permanently banned, you have a persistent ghost of that user on your blocked-users list, that cannot be removed. If an obnoxious troll who only does something banworthy once a month, makes a habit of registering new accounts once banned, and you make a habit of blocking them as soon as you spot a new account, you can come up with quite the collection of ghosts. (And maybe that's a function of how the site using it is set up, rather than Disqus itself. But if it makes it easy to introduce such antifeatures, that's not a good sign.)
I've seen enough to make me conclude Disqus is a dark evil to be avoided; YMMV.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday November 21 2016, @07:03AM
Notwithstanding the issues you described, they actually have a pretty interesting infrastructure from a technical point of view and I don't know of another free service like that that you can include on any site, where you can add a html/javascript snippet.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:25AM
Disqus [...] my experience is entirely as a user
I don't have any admin experience with Disqus either.
As a user, it's blocked on my box.
PipeDot was also suggested above.
They both require JavaScript, making them non-starters for me.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Bethany.Saint on Monday November 21 2016, @10:45PM
What comment system doesn't use JavaScript? Is that even possible these days?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:34AM
Rehash. (My favorite.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:58AM
the moment soylent requires TypeScript, this AC is gone forever...