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:
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, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Monday November 21 2016, @05:50AM
Rehash - if it was a personal project and I had way more time than now, I'd seriously consider rehash.
I've always really liked the slash/soylent moderation system, and honestly don't think there's better way to go.
However, we're looking for a more or less off the shelf, plug it in and aim the URL at it solution.
Also, we actually like to be able to post an image with the topic posts, which rehash/slash doesn't offer.
Disqus - count me among those who really, really dislike Disqus. The times that I tried to post a comment using it were so unpleasant that I just stopped trying. I think it's a seriously broken solution looking for a problem.
Wordpress - I've run more than few Wordpress installs over the years, self hosted. Maybe things have changed, but I always found that if you couldn't monitor them 24/7 you would quickly be buried under an avalanche of comment spam.
Since our users want room for Anon (non-account holder) comments I can't see Wordpress working for us, unless the Wordpress hosted version has figured out how to keep the spammers at bay.
If we have to wade through 100 spam posts to find the two or three legitimate ones we'll abandon the thing very quickly.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday November 21 2016, @02:49PM
LiveJournal is an option. Highly configurable, literally created OpenID, and permits anonymous comments.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 22 2016, @12:40AM
And Lvejournal's spinoff, Dreamwidth, which is to Livejournal as Soylent News is to Slashdot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:01AM
*cough* deadjournal *cough*
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday November 21 2016, @11:00PM
As I previously said, I'd be willing to look at a hosted solution for rehash. It's certainly possible, its mostly just a matter if its worth the trouble to set it up w/ billing (since we realistically can't host it out of the bottom of our hearts for free, though I'd try very hard to keep the price at least reasonable. :/).
Still always moving