[pmwiki-users] Pondering adding comment ability to wiki pages, and thoughts on spam prevention

[tamouse mailing lists]

Hi, all,

I've long been contemplating adding commenting ability to my wiki
pages (or some of them) and I've been debating different ways of doing
this. I've read through the various cook book recipes and weighed
different methods and options.

I like the idea of -Talk pages as implemented in pmwiki.org to hold
discussions. It seems like a pretty straight-forward way of providing
that sort of mechanism if you want to hold discussions about the
contents of the base page. However, it really does seem quite
different than getting casual, drop-by comments from a reader who
merely wants to ask a question or make a note of something on the page
itself. So I think I'm going with a hybrid solution of -Talk pages for
discussion about the page, it's accuracy or it's future, and a comment
box type function for each page as well.

For the drive-by comments, it seems like the recommend method is to
include a comments page, with an editing form on it, rather than embed
the comments and form directly on the page itself. Is this still true?

The question of spam blocking always hits me in this arena. I'm no
stranger to finding captcha code places, however, I really do not like
most of it; to make things the most difficult for the bots seems to
also make things overly difficult for the user. I wonder if anyone
else has looked at alternatives to using a captcha. I was recently
pointed to http://textcaptcha.com/really which gives several reasons
why you should not use a captcha at all unless you are absolutely sure
it is necessary. The techniques they show seem really quite doable,
but I'm not sure how much could be done via recipes alone (perhaps all
of it?). I'd at least like to start working on a recipe that can
implement some of the techniques they describe (perhaps a few recipes
might be necessary, not sure) with an eye towards integrating them
into the various ways pmwiki uses forms.

At any rate, I'd like to know if others have attempted to do something
similar both with discussions and comments, and with spam prevention
that does not use captcha or require logins.

Thanks!