Desperately seeking comments alternative
The current situation with comments on apocryph.org is untenable. Before I upgraded to Drupal 6 I used the Akismet module to catch comment spam, which meant I could safely allow anyone to post comments without authentication or approval, with reasonable confidence that akismet would catch the spam before it got posted.
That worked great, but the Akismet module hasn’t been ported to Drupal 6, and I’m beginning to think it’s not maintained anymore since the dev snapshot hasn’t been updated since September. Right now I have comments enabled but they go to the approval queue, which I just spent half an hour cleaning out due to the torrent of spam comments various spambots keep posting.
I know there are hosted comment solutions with AJAX goodness and spam filtering, but I really prefer to host my own, plus I must be able to keep the existing comments already posted through Drupal. Oh, what to do!
Trying out disqus comments
After posting my lament about the shitty blog comment options in Drupal, I’ve rummaged around and decided to give Disqus a try. The comment system is hosted by them completely separately from Drupal, but their system allows me to export comments so if/when they go tits up I can at least save the comments off somewhere.
I’m not too crazy on their integration scheme, which relies on using AJAX goodness to insert the comments into a
divelement I provide on each page. This means search engines won’t index any comments in situ, though I imagine engines crawl the Disqus site and will find them that way.Anyhow, it’s a shitty implementation, but it was the best I could find. Hopefully the Akismet module for Drupal gets ported to 6.x or I find some other way to solve the comments problem.