Customizing Amonymous Comments In Drupal

This concerns Drupal 6.3 and possibly others -- it relates to anonymous commenting. After deciding to allow anonymous comments on blog posts for my sites, I wanted to avoid a massive influx of comment spam, my first step was to add captchas with the aid of the reCaptcha module. I also wanted to force Anonymous users to include their names and email addresses, a common enough practice on blog sites around the Net. Before I go on, I suppose I should point out that I have documented this on my site, complete with screenshots for others who might run into this later.

The trouble here is that finding the settings for this in Drupal is anything but easy. What would you expect? Something under comment settings in the Administration menu? You could be wrong if you said yes. Even though the menu option clearly states that "Comment page" (admin/content/comment_page) lets you "Adjust the settings for the comment page module. How about under Permissions or Access Rules. Wrong and wrong again. In fact, there is nothing in the administration menu that says anything about Anonymous Commenting. What to do?

As it turns out, you set up Anonymous Commenting this way: Administer-> Content Types-> BLog Entry-> Edit. Now, look down to where it says "Comment settings" and click that link to open up the options below. You'll see a host of options for commenting in general and, more importantly for this discussion, Anonymous commenting. Check the radio button labeled "Anonymous posters must leave their contact information", save your settings, and off you go. Make sure, of course, that your system permissions allow anonymous users to post comments.

As you can see, the functionality is there, but isn't entirely intuitive, even from an administration point of view. Perhaps a little tweaking of the administrative menus is in order?

--Marcel