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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 blackhawk on Monday November 21 2016, @04:10AM
I have used wordpress.com for a few years now and it's really trouble free and cost free unless you want your own vanity domain name - and then it's only $17 / year.
It comes with a bunch of built-in features, including a pretty decent spam filter which has caught 100% of all my spam so far. It has decent support for comments, and a good set of admin tools. Best of all, it's hosted on their infrastructure, so there is no risk of an exploit taking all your other services with it.
I'd recommend it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:29AM
I've seen several items over the last year mentioning WordPress sites getting pwned.
(I'll admit that I didn't pay real close attention to the specifics.)
Was that just admins not updating--or real problems with the codebase?
What's the time-to-patch like with WordPress?
.
On the comment spam issue, I've seen several sites which have an extra (dummy) dialog box that contains something like "This is for bots; don't write here".
It seems logical that the more layers you have for the spammers to trip over, the less you have to mess with manually.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday November 21 2016, @01:19PM
I've seen those reports, too... and I had more trouble with it with a WordPress site hosted by a provider than one hosted by WordPress themselves - the provider didn't keep up with the updates as well as they could have and eventually the provider basically handed the keys over to the site owners and "made them responsible" to keep up with the updates.
I do think that the sites hosted on WordPress.com (even the free ones) are as protected against comment spam as any other high profile targets on the internet... not perfect, but also not "wide open just waiting for script kiddies to ravage."
So, yeah, if you've seen some news stories and just feel like it's not an option because somebody reported a problem, then try to find something else. My long-running (5 years) wordpress site (http://5050by2150.wordpress.com) mostly suffers from lack of attention, not comment spam - but, then, I'm not attracting too many political graffiti artists, yet.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by blackhawk on Monday November 21 2016, @01:47PM
That's a combination of admins not updating the sites to the latest patches, and rogue plug-ins being installed by over-zealous users.
Wordpress.com just updates the stuff for me, which is great, since I have zero interest in having to keep a site patched these days. I run very few plug-ins, just the spam filter basically, so that's also not a concern.
In short, they offer a free Wordpress site, that is maintained by them, updated by them and has access to a bunch of good plug-ins - some of which you will need to pay for if you use them. It's secure in the sense that it's not on your infrastructure and gets timely updates from the Wordpress team.
The only drawbacks for you might be that they reserve the right to run some adds. I've never seen any on my site, but then my site is for very specific programming tech and is low traffic.
At any time, you can export your site for backup purposes or to import it to any other Wordpress host.
Further, word is that security for Wordpress these days is pretty good, and on par with any other publishing platform.