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#1 2006-10-24 07:15:30

jnfor
New Member
Registered: 2006-08-18
Posts: 5

comment preview

I really like textpattern and I use it on multiple project – works great. What drives me crazy now is the comment preview – it looks so confusing for visitors as they might think that their comment was already posted – they can see it on the page and there is no reason for them to look for the submit button somewhere below – even though I write it there, most people don’t read everything on the page. At least before I could have the comment preview show on top of the page, now that doesn’t work… prety bad. Real shame there is no alternative to prevent spam, for example captcha.

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#2 2006-10-24 07:34:54

Sencer
Archived Developer
From: cgn, de
Registered: 2004-03-23
Posts: 1,803
Website

Re: comment preview

I think you have several misconceptions there. Let me point out that:

it looks so confusing for visitors as they might think that their comment was already posted – they can see it on the page and there is no reason for them to look for the submit button somewhere below

Then you should make sure to style the page in a way that makes clear it wasn’t posted yet. You can use different colors and different fonts for the previewed comment. You can also add a coloured message that appears only when the preview is made.

At least before I could have the comment preview show on top of the page, now that doesn’t work

You can have the comment-preview in any place you like, if you are unsure how to use the relevant conment/preview tags in your forms, I suggest you open a topic in “How do I?”

Real shame there is no alternative to prevent spam, for example captcha.

There’s several internal built-in features besides the preview that prevent spam – most of them are totally transparent to users (and you not noticing them I would consider a good thing), but they help block a considerable amount of spam. And yes, some of them depend on the preview, but it’s actually a lot more than just the preview. Some that do not rely on the preview and checking for duplicate comments, banning of commenters, moderation, auto-closing of comments after a certain amount of time, checking commenter-IPs against backlists etc.

In addition there is plugins and a plugin-API that allows for many, many different kinds of Anti-Spam measures to be implemented. There is in fact a CAPTCHA-plugin available, as well as one that relies on numbers of urls and blacklisted words.

You can find this and more in the documentation:
http://textpattern.net/wiki/index.php?title=Combat_Comment_Spam

The reason that few anti-spam plugins have been written, is that most people do not get that many spam comments with Textpattern in the first place.

Last edited by Sencer (2006-10-24 07:36:16)

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#3 2006-10-24 08:00:50

jnfor
New Member
Registered: 2006-08-18
Posts: 5

Re: comment preview

Thank you for your help, I’ll see what I can do…
I personaly never got a spam through TXP, I was just referring to what was written in FAQ – suggesting that if you remove preview than there is a bing chance for spammers open…

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#4 2006-10-24 08:22:49

Sencer
Archived Developer
From: cgn, de
Registered: 2004-03-23
Posts: 1,803
Website

Re: comment preview

suggesting that if you remove preview than there is a bing chance for spammers open…

That is correct. Preview, and all the things that depend on it, are an important part of spam-prevention. I just wanted to point out, that it is not the only thing we rely on.

Last edited by Sencer (2006-10-24 08:23:06)

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