Restrict comments to certain exhibitions only?

[mikeprince]

Is it possible to allow viewer comments (and/or ratings) on specific exhibitions only, or is the use of comments global (applies to all or none)?

Further the function ee_datacleaner strips potentially dubious text from comments. Is there any security issue in allowing the apostrophe, which is stripped currently? I think it's quite common for viewers to enter comments such as "I'd crop more from the left..." etc. and at the moment this is changed to "Id crop..." which is a bit annoying. I've changed the function to replace "'d" with " would" to fix my example, but it's not possible to come up with a simple replacement for "'s" since this could represent "it's" or "Mike's" for example.

These questions all come about because I've just started exploring some aspects of EE that I've never used before and am quite impressed!

Cheers
-- Mike --

[mikeprince]

And another question: the viewer's entered email address and homepage are not displayed online against the comment. I assume this is deliberate and agree it makes sense for email address, but surely homepage can and should be displayed?

[wkitty42]

as with most all guestbooks and comment pages, one has to be careful what they allow and expose...

email addresses are (most likely) not displayed due to spambots harvesting them when they crawl one's website...

there is also a similar problem with any website links... search engines gather them and use them, in some cases, to rank popularity of a site... the more "backlinks" to a site, the higher it is ranked in the search engine and thus it shows up closer to the top of the search results... many viagra and pr0n spammers have bots that go around filling in guestbooks and comment pages with their spamvertisements in their efforts to get their sites to rise in SE ratings...

if anyone knows about this type of stuff, it is those that operate forums like this one... i'm sure that pekka and his moderators have their hands full at times... i know that i have a few pesky ones that do their darnedest to pollute my small site's forums but they don't last very long at all ;)

[mikeprince]

Fair enough! Anyone have an answer to my first post?

[wkitty42]

if i've still got it all straight in my head... eE v1.5 and older had the comments on a per exhibit format... however, in v2, pekka decided to go with a global comment section... it caused me a small bit of shock because i had exhibit comments that were specific to a certain exhibit and they didn't make sense any more being global...

i'm not sure how easy it would be to go back to a per exhibit format... probably pretty easy but in my case, i simply turned the guestbook (aka comments) off and only allow comments on per photo/picture... at least until i start getting spammers hitting that, too and then i'll turn them off as well...

[mikeprince]

however, in v2, pekka decided to go with a global comment section...
Shame, because I have several exhibitions but only want to allow comments for one. I suppose I could keep global comments on but update all individual photos (directly in the database) to turn off allow comments for those that I don't want commented. However, this is 90+% of all my photos, and will be most of the new photos I upload so to keep remembering to change this (manually) as new photos are uploaded isn't a workable solution.

Would appreciate some more suggestions!

[wkitty42]

let's see if i understand better...
you do not want all photos to have comments (or rankings)
you do not want all exhibits to have comments
you only want to allow some photos to have comments (and rankings)
the restricted comment photos (on line above) are all in one exhibit only

is that pretty accurate?

[mikeprince]

Yep, that's pretty much it. In fact it can be expressed more simply as "I would like comments to be configurable on a per exhibition basis", i.e. if an exhibition is configured to allow comments then all photos in that exhibition would allow comments, if an exhibition is configured to disallow comments then no photos in that exhibition could be commented.

Incidentally I won't look to use rankings at all.

[Pekka]

Yep, that's pretty much it. In fact it can be expressed more simply as "I would like comments to be configurable on a per exhibition basis", i.e. if an exhibition is configured to allow comments then all photos in that exhibition would allow comments, if an exhibition is configured to disallow comments then no photos in that exhibition could be commented.

Incidentally I won't look to use rankings at all.

(please be accurate with terms: "comments and ratings" and "guestbook").

I have made comments and ratings a per-photo setting because in my mind that is the logical arrangement to have. A photo can belong to several exhibitions, especially easy with virtual exhibitions, and to make comments and ratings setting exhibition-level would add confusion when browsing.

Guestbook is now global because having them tied to exhibition made finding them hard, lost them when exhibition was hid or removed.

But of course all can be coded if the requirement is logical and especially that visitors can understand why things are the way they are.

[mikeprince]

(please be accurate with terms: "comments and ratings" and "guestbook").
I thought I had :). I agree that a guestbook makes sense to be global (and is not actually something I would look to use).

A photo can belong to several exhibitions, especially easy with virtual exhibitions, and to make comments and ratings setting exhibition-level would add confusion when browsing.
Yep, I realise that including a photo in multiple exhibitions makes the comments configurability on exhibition level more complicated. At least the way I have set up my exhibitions the typical user behaviour is to browse a single exhibition at a time; therefore it is quite logical for all photos (or none) to be 'commentable'. In fact it would be quite confusing to a user if some photos in an exhibition were commentable but others were not.

But of course all can be coded if the requirement is logical and especially that visitors can understand why things are the way they are.It's certainly a logical requirement according to me, so I look forward to a future update containing this! :lol:

Thanks very much for your response.

[wkitty42]

I thought I had :). I agree that a guestbook makes sense to be global (and is not actually something I would look to use).

i thought i had been clear, too... i guess maybe i hadn't... i likely won't ever use a "guestbook", per se', but i would like to have comments on exhibits as well as on individual photos...

i've still got one "exhibit comment" from the upgrade that i guess i'm going to have to manually place as a "photo comment" on a photo from the exhibit in question... i'll likely end up doing that from behind the scenes with phpmyadmin... i don't think it'll be too hard to do...

pekka, i understand the change and fully support it... i just won't use a guestbook due to the spammers and their mess... maybe once you get all the user code completed, the guestbook can be activated only for logged in users?? i'll take it that way as long as i can handle who actually gets an account like in forum packages like this one and/or phpBB... in fact, i have a few ideas on that that are kinda of implemented in my phpBB setup... all my spammers are now humans and doing it manually but they don't last long enough for the search engines to gather their postings... and since my mods don't allow the users to access things like signature, web site, and other spam desirable fields, as well as having changable GET/POST variables, their bots fail completely ;)

[Epicurean]

I realize there hasn't been much activity on this thread lately, but I'm getting back up to speed with EE and have a similar "wish"

As an alternative, I'd love to be able to set options on the first uploaded image of a group and be able to select an setting that applies that to all remaining uploaded images. In my example, I would want upload a group of maybe 40 photos and be able to uncheck the allow comments option and have that applied for the remaining 39 images.

Maybe it's already there and I'm just not seeing it.