[pmwiki-users] David Spitzley's commentsmailed.php

[Tegan Dowling]

Hi, all:

We've been using the Comments recipe for ages - the three "public" actions
that we usually have links to in our headers are "email this page"
(MyWikiFriends recipe), "printable view of page" (?action=print), and
"comment on this page" (Comments recipe). The problem with having the
Comments feature, though, is that it's very, very seldom used. It's used so
seldom that one typically never develops the habit (or else falls out of the
habit) of checking for comments, which means that a visitor goes to the
trouble of posting a comment and then never gets a response - not a good
thing.

So recently, when I noticed David Spitzley's commentsmailed.php variant of
the comments recipe, I hoped that would resolve this issue. Unfortunately,
I've now stopped looking at the comments lines in the mailposts, just as I
stopped checking
AllRecentComments, because there are vastly more "false positives" than
actual, legitimate reports of comments.

First: It appears that the ".Comment" version of a page is created the first
time someone uses ?action=comment, even if he/she does not create and save a
comment on the page, and also that a comment transaction is added to the
mailpost whenever anyone uses ?action=comment.

Second: Based on the mailposts, which show a comment transaction on one page
after another, I'm suspecting that a robot may be crawling the sites and
somehow performing the ?action=comment. When I look in wiki.d/, I see a
".Comments" version of every page, though none have any content, and
"AllRecentComments" isn't registering any activity. Does this make sense? I
can't believe any person is methodically working his/her way through every
page on these sites clicking "Comment" and then exiting without adding
anything.

I'd prefer that the ".Comment" page not be created unless an actual comment
is added, and I'd very much prefer not to see the "false positives" in the
mailposts. Any thoughts on how this could be prevented?

(Ultimately, I would wish to see comments integrated into (All)RecentChanges
as well as into the mailposts)

Thanks for giving it your consideration,

Tegan
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