Should I use delegated or native comments for my niche community site?
I'm adding authentication right now and, facing the O-Auth question, wondering if I should go with delegated comments via Facebook or Disqus, or stick with my native system.
Since this is a side project (I'm a writer in a tech-ish field) I don't have much time for moderation. My biggest fear is that, left (relatively) untended, my small community site will be overrun by spambots and trolls.
A delegated system doesn't completely forestall this, but it does offer its own spam tools and (in the case of FB especially) a persistent user identity that might discourage trolling. On the other hand, I could do more with a native system, and if it turned out to be possible, I'd love to add my own simple spam/hatespeech detection as another learning exercise.
Does anyone have experience with a similar side project? Or are there any moderators who might have insight into the system?
17 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadI think that making one will also give you more of an insight into how the delegated ones work - that can't be a bad thing!
e.g. I wrote https://github.com/skx/e-comments/ for a static-site that wanted comments. You could use something like that, then later bring it into the main app/site as required. The value here is that you own the data, not disqus, etc.
Even if it is a non-niche site, your assuming it will be popular with trolls/spambots. So as you can see your worrying about a problem you may never have. However, you are wise to think about it and be ready.
Since you said you want this to be a learning experience, go ahead and write your own commenting system. It will teach you a lot. Put up some small barriers to prevent spam. Captcha, email verification, SMS verification, etc. These are all pretty easy to do and there are services that will help you out.
Lastly, if it does become a troll hole then be prepared to migrate your data. I would say put off writing any migration scripts, but maybe look at the comment services and see how you can import comments. I've done this before on Disqus and it is not too hard.
Or put it this way, if your website becomes so popular, that spammers will customize their programs to try to automatically post on your page, you have bigger problems :)
It's nice to hear from someone in the same space.
How the spammers work. Really short and banal explanation: - dear program, find wordpress blogs (in a certain niche, or any blog - I am not picky today) - footprint of the day will be "powered by wordpress"
- thanks for the list, now check each url if that blog has a form for comments enabled
- great, now, because you were programmed to know which inputs (name, e-mail, content) (and with what names/IDs) needed to be filled, use my predefined texts and submit
- oh, and if you see a capcha, would you be so kind to OCR it and fill the right text there also? thanks
- check after one hour if the comment is visible (yes? woohoo - we found an auto-approve blog! - no? ok, check in one week)
Hmm, that gave me an idea for a honeypot webpage. One single page with footprints of many blogs and forums, some forms on it and IP logger. Every IP that would like to submit anything on this page, goes to the sh.tlist.
But I started the project when a custom CMS of mine (more or less) started getting added to the spammer-lists. It seems like it's only a matter of time these days until people find your site and submit 10-500 comments a day. Some I can see are clearly bots, or compromised IPs, others are clearly humans (presumably paid very cheaply).
Are there any other forum moderation tools you would recommend (not competitors, obviously)? I'm curious what else is available to the homebrewer.
The success rate is pretty fluid but about 80% of comments submitted were judged to be spam today. Whether there are too many false negatives/positives is hard for me to say ..
Good luck with fighting spam. There are never enough of you!
Do you want spread the content or you want to enrich the content? It's very important to know.
I can see you already accepted the challenge to build the thing from nothing. What worries you seems the hard and must-do decision, because if you chose a delegated system you will have a big problems to migrate the content generated through the comments.
If you want just spread the content, go with the delegated systems, FB for e.g.
If you want to create value, build your system, it will give you space to explore possibilities that underlies out of your sight.
Could you elaborate?
Thinking about delegated systems I can only see two purposes: a) Make your project/content be acknowledged by the people (Spread by piggybacking) or b) Cut off engineering resources regarding to the lack of value created through those comments.
At some point, we need to decide if the comments are a value to keep or to trade.
Do you want spread the content or you want to enrich the content? It's very important to know.
I can see you already accepted the challenge to build the thing from nothing. What worries you seems the hard and must-do decision, because if you chose a delegated system you will have a big problems to migrate the content generated through the comments.
If you want just spread the content, go with the delegated systems, FB for e.g.
If you want to create value, build your system, it will give you space to explore possibilities that underlies out of your sight.