hmmm, 11 pages of requests.

Well, here's another of mine.

I would like to be notified by e-mail of any comments made on my site. For example, if someone writes a comment on an article I wrote two years ago, I'll have no idea.

Users should also be able to "subscribe" to comments for things as well.

Any administrator wanting to monitor their site should agree with this addition. If you don't see a bad comment, you won't be able to deal with it appropriately.

That is a great idea, I like that.

I'm not wild about comments either, for news posts I'm going to move to making forum posts instead, I'm just tinkering with a couple of things to do that. Some of the reservations I have are related to that lack of visibility as well.

ians wrote:

I'm not wild about comments either, for news posts I'm going to move to making forum posts instead, I'm just tinkering with a couple of things to do that. Some of the reservations I have are related to that lack of visibility as well.

Now that is a possbly cooler idea by having comments for news actually be within a forum set aside for news articles with each topic being the news article title. That way whether people comment on it within the forum, or from the article, it goes into the same comment type bucket, so-to-speak.

it's funny, I've a longer flight of fancy I start to wonder why comments, news articles or forum posts are not all treated as ubiquitous objects and then meta data defines the context. I've worked on mail store implementations that work on this principle.

However, in a more limited scope, I'm adding buttons via a theme to allow discussion on a news article to go to forums.

ians wrote:

it's funny, I've a longer flight of fancy I start to wonder why comments, news articles or forum posts are not all treated as ubiquitous objects and then meta data defines the context. I've worked on mail store implementations that work on this principle.

Sounds like a great idea to me. Now we just need to get someone to listen.

Heh - then we would have Drupal

I have suggested using the CPG-BB base for comments on News, Articles, Galleries, but also to present the Members with internal account-based Guestbooks/Forums.

Mystic wrote:

ians wrote: I'm not wild about comments either, for news posts I'm going to move to making forum posts instead, I'm just tinkering with a couple of things to do that. Some of the reservations I have are related to that lack of visibility as well. Now that is a possbly cooler idea by having comments for news actually be within a forum set aside for news articles with each topic being the news article title. That way whether people comment on it within the forum, or from the article, it goes into the same comment type bucket, so-to-speak.

I now have a version of this running on mysnowsports.com/test_cpg. Basically a "discuss" button appears on the under the articles, on first use this will create a forum post using the text of the teaser portion on the article spoofing it as having been submitted by the story submitter. The post goes to a nominated forum. This is all done via a new program placed in the Forums module, it's done that way as it makes picking up all the forum code easier.

The forum that the articles appear in could be set so no new topics are allowed which would mean only these "news" discussions would ever appear.

There's a new table which contains a mapping of story, topic and forum post id's. This is needed for subsequent visits to the discuss link so we don't start multiple topics.

It needs some minor tidy up, the language files need updating, the forum is hard-coded and should be moved to the admin screen, and I need to decide if any user authentication is really needed.

ians wrote:

I now have a version of this running on mysnowsports.com/test_cpg.

I really hate messing around with main functionality on my site. Is there any way the Devs can look at your work and add it to the core? This would be a huge benefit, and solve the problem of not knowing when someone leaves a comment.

Forums are easier to scan for new material (even if they don't auto-notify yet of new topics), and are the best place to perform discussions on articles.

If someone leaves a comment I wrote on an article I wrote several years ago I'd never know it. Plus that comment could be very unacceptable for the site and I would have no idea it was there.

Something must be done about this soon I feel, and this sounds like an awesome solution by leveraging what we already have in place.

Mystic, I couldn't have put it better myself, that's exactly my thinking with regards to comments and exactly my own reservations about running dodgy mod's.

In fact, this is really a very, very simple solution, it's less than a 100 lines of code and that's only because I'm a fan of white space I only altered 1 line of an existing file to add the link, the reset is new files and a new table.

For the sake of users - PLEASE PM the Devs with this solution, it is sorely needed and wouldn't be a problem for users who don't want to use it.

actually, I realise I need to make a small addition, right now I'm linking news stories to forum posts using a lookup table. I just realised that the table shouldn't be restricted to stories, obviously with a simple addition of link type I can link content or downloads etc.

Excellent - this way you can have comments on News, Galleries, Pictures, Downloads and just about everything with comments use the Forums for better structuring, better layout, better frigging everything!

Anyone talk to the developers about this?