"Contact details" for anonymous users are an all-or-nothing affair; you can't let them enter a name without also letting them enter a home page. On my sites at least, the home page is a nearly constant source of annoying spam, and results in comments like this:

Name: CarInsuranceMan
Homepage: http://somecarinsurancespamsite.com/
Comment: Something perfectly normal. It might even be a real human entering this in, or perhaps they've pulled the comment from some other post on the internet with similar content. Who knows.

Some of these are blatant spam attempts, others are more subtle. The end result is I need to read every new comment and usually end up deleting almost all of them that weren't posted within 24 hours of a blog post. Blah.

So. Let's add an option to toggle the "Homepage" field, as that would deter spammers, or at least make it more obvious (if someone enters SomeCarInsuranceSpamSite.com as their name, I don't need to read any further ;)).

Comments

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented

This is how I'm thinking of doing this...

Currently:
1. Anonymous commenting is set per-content type. Which means that if you want to allow anonymous comments on stories, blog entries, and forum topics, you need to set that option in 3 places.
2. Options are as follows (on each content type):

ANONYMOUS COMMENTING:
o Anonymous posters may not enter their contact information
o Anonymous posters may enter their contact information
o Anonymous posters must enter their contact information

3. There's also a default anonymous name, but that's over in admin/settings/site-information.

I propose:

1. Anonymous commenting options gets moved to a global settings page:
Administer >> Site configuration >> Anonymous user (or similar)
2. Move over the default anonymous name setting to this page.
3. Settings page looks like this:

ANONYOUS DEFAULT NAME:
[ Anonymous            ]

ANONYMOUS AUTHOR FIELDS:
[ ] Name      | [ ] Required
[ ] E-mail    | [ ] Required
[ ] Homepage  | [ ] Required

I also want to get rid of that silly disabling crap when the permission isn't set, since I like to set my permissions at the very end and this breaks up my flow, dude.

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented
Title: Allow toggling the "Homepage" field for anonymous commenters » Centralize and improve granularity of anonymous user settings

Better title.

aren cambre’s picture

aren cambre commented

Was this issue worked on? If so, did it cause #629848: Anon commenters disabled by default??

Status: Active » Closed (outdated)

Automatically closed because Drupal 7 security and bugfix support has ended as of 5 January 2025. If the issue verifiably applies to later versions, please reopen with details and update the version.