comments

Comments are the lifeblood of most websites that aim to be social. Drupal based sites are no exception. In fact the feedback I'm seeing is that many people who are new to Drupal get involved with it because building a robust social network using Drupal is easier than something like WordPress which is heavily focused on blogging. That doesn't mean that you won't have to put some thought into how to set up your commenting if you're building a Drupal site.

I like Drupal's built in comment system. It has nice features like threaded comments,  a comment approval section, search indexing of comments and the ability to turn comments on and off for each individual node. Out of the box the comments are very usable for low traffic websites. But if you expect a lot of activity on your site then your comment needs will require putting more thought into how you set things up. Your first big choice will be to decide whether you should build on the existing comment system using contributed modules or if you should use a 3rd party commenting system like Disqus, JS-Kit Echo or IntenseDebate.

If Drupal's built in comments are so good then why even think about shutting them off? As good as the comments are they don't necessarily meet all the needs you might have. For example, if you expect a lot of commenting but don't want to have to do a lot of maintenance and configuration on your Drupal site then a 3rd party system might be good for you. Let's say you want site visitors to be able to authenticate themselves using Google Friend Connect, Facebook or Twitter which are the most popular social networking services in the U.S. right now. You could utilize at least two contributed modules to make your site do that. But you would also spend quite a bit more time doing that than you would just configuring the Disqus module which gives you all of those features which are available via the free (for now) Disqus service. You can see a sample of how Disqus integrates on the module developer's site here. Another attractive feature typically included in these systems involves notifications. Moderators and comments can either subscribe to comments via an RSS feed or by email. Notification features can help to create a community on your site and keep people coming back for repeat visits.

The mileage you get out of 3rd party commenting systems will vary. When you opt for an outsourced approach for such a large portion of your site you also lose some control. Most services will keep a backup of your comments in case you decide to switch back to your native comment system. That doesn't mean that re-importing the comments back into Drupal will be easy. Your site may also be affected by the performance of the servers of the 3rd party service. If their servers have a problem then your site will likely load slowly or comments might not show up at all. So be aware of the trade offs.

If you want people to create accounts on your site in order to comment then you'll want to stick with the core comment system. The 3rd party offerings may authenticate users but they don't create a user profile on your site. If that's the way you're going then there are some contributed modules that you'll want to know about that can enhance the core Drupal commenting experience.

Identity

These modules help to establish the identity of commenters on your site.

• Gravatar - Displays pictures for anonymous commenters who also use the Gravatar service.
• Google Friend Connect - Creates user accounts using Google Friend Connect API.
• Facebook Connect - Creates user accounts using the Facebook Connect API. Also allows commenters to publish comments back to their Facebook wall.
• Gigya Socialize - Offers a single API for creating accounts using identities from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google and others.

Spam

These modules help to limit the effects of spam on your site.

• Mollom - Offers spam filtering via text analysis and captcha presentation.
• AntiSpam - Offers access to the Akismet, Defensio and TypePad spam filtering services.
• Captcha - Allows you to present a CAPTCHA (which is a challenge image) to commenters.
• Comment Lockdown - Applies a set of rules that make it harder for comment spam to get through.

Notification and Moderation

These modules provide notifications of new comments and assist with moderation.

• Comment Notify - Allows registered and anonymous users to get comment notifications via email.
• Watcher - Similar to Comment Notify.
• Comment Moderation - Adds features that improve the comment moderation workflow.

So you've been presented with a lot of options here. The modules listed above certainly don't represent a complete list. You're welcome to link to your favorite ones in the comments. The approach you take will depend on the goals you have for your site, the number of comments you receive and your level of technical knowledge with respect to Drupal and the 3rd party services (such as Disqus) and APIs (such as Facebook Connect) that I've mentioned. 

On many sites communities begin with comments. And the comment features found in Drupal are deep enough that they can help you turn a website into a community.

Drupal not only contains many comment related features but also settings for each content type contained within your Drupal install. So you can have different comment settings for blog posts and pages for example. The screenshots below show the standard comment settings for Drupal.

Comment Settings

The standard comment settings contain many options to help you customize the experience for your users. You dcomments can be  threaded discussions or flat. When comments are flat each comment always appears after the previous one. Threaded discussion allow users to reply to specific comments and those replies are grouped together.

As of Drupal 6 comments are searchable. So when users search your site the returned results may include information contained in the comments. You can also provide a field that allows people to enter a title for their comment, which makes the comments have the feel of a forum. If you allow anonymous comments you can also choose to require that commenters provide contact information.

Protecting Comments

The access controls within Drupal give you the option to only make comments available to those who have registered for an account on your site. This feature provides you a certain amount of protection against malicious comments. Limiting comments to registered users can reduce the amount of comments you receive. You also have the option of editing the overall permissions for commenters so that all posted comments (or only those posted by anonymous users) will be held for approval. An example of the comment management queue is shown in the picture at left.

You can allow anonymous comments and still be protected if you add comment protection modules like Akismet or Mollom. Both of these modules call back to a central server to prevent comments that they think might be spam. I've tried both and they work well and can help keep your site protected.

A simpler option for protecting comments involves presenting a visual riddle to ensure that the poster is a human and not a machine.The captcha and recaptcha modules will add such a riddle at the end of your comment submission forms. Users must type in the correct word presented in order to successfully submit their comment. It's worth noting that captchas are not fool proof and some users get annoyed when presented with a captcha.

Extending Comment Functions

Drupal has plenty of modules that can help you add features to make comments more compelling. Comment RSS provides an RSS feed of comments for your site and for individual nodes. Comment Closer lets you shut down the comments on a particular node after a given amount of time. Comment Notify allows users to be notified automatically via email of follow up comments on a node.Comment Subscribe offers similar features to Comment Notify but allows you to only subscribe to direct replies of a particular comment.

A relatively new service called Disqus offers the ability to totally replace the Drupal comment system with a comment system manage on their servers. The Disqus module allows site owners to make that switch. Spam protection is then handled by Disqus but you also lose the ability of Drupal 6 to index the comments so that they may appear in your search results.

Tools For Site Administrators

There are a few different tools that can help a site adminstrator to stay on top of comments. By subscribing to the previously mentioned Comment RSS module you can stay abreast of recent site comments in your RSS feed reader. You could also use the comment RSS feed to create a widget (using a site like Widgetbox) that can be posted on another site or social network.

In Drupal 6 You can set up triggers and actions to generate an email each time a comment is posted on your site. The Subscriptions module appears to provide similar functionality. The Watcher module (currently only Drupal 5) allows node authors to receive notificatons of new comments via email.

Administrators also have to option of placing a recent comments block on their site. The recent comments block is a standard option in the block administration view for a Drupal install. When activated, the block will display a link to the ten most recently posted comments on your site in reverse chronological order.