Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
There's been some previous discussion around comments on feed accounts. Currently, comments are enabled on feed accounts as a courtesy to Dreamwidth users who would like a forum, however ephemeral, to discuss the feed amongst themselves, particularly when the source does not allow comments (such as XKCD).

However, it's not immediately obvious to someone who is unfamiliar with feed accounts that the comments won't be sent back to the original source of the feed, and that the comments will vanish when the feed entries vanish after 14 days.

I suggest a notice, to be displayed on the entry page above the comments section (so it's visible to readers and to people using quickreply), and on the reply page. It would say something like: Only feed entries from the last 14 days are displayed on Dreamwidth. Comments left on feed entries will not be saved after the entry is gone.

(People using quickerreply from their reading pages probably wouldn't have that notice visible.)

Users would be given enough information to decide for themselves whether to try to leave their comment on the source, or whether it's more appropriate for the comments on the feed. It could feel unnecessary or annoying to users who are already aware, and would introduce another little delay for screen reader users to try to skip over.


(If implemented cleverly, this could possibly be reused to support comment policy notices for communities and personal journals.)

Description:
Spun off the comments on http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/1374810.html --

Spam comments are a woe that should be discouraged, while not discouraging comments of legitimate discourse from real sentient beings.

Most comment spam on Dreamwidth is anonymous. One of the places that spammers strike is the accounts of people who have become inactive. If someone's not around for any particular reason, they generally can't get rid of any spam that shows up in their journal. Emboldened by the way their first overtures have not been repelled or cleaned up, the spammer strikes again, and again, and again.

Anonymous spam is present until cleaned up by the journal owner (or someone logged in as them). Registered user/OpenID spam is only present until someone (someone else hit by the spammer, or a good neighbor) reports the spammer and the spammer is suspended; all of the spam comments left by that user will then go away across the site.

For this reason, it is more important to attempt to repel anonymous spam in the event that the journal owner is not around and therefore not able to take action.

When the journal owner becomes inactive, and the journal allows anonymous comments, and the journal owner does not already present anonymous comments with a CAPTCHA, and anonymous comments are not screened by default (screening leaves the anonymous comments invisible to search engines unless the journal owner comes through and unscreens them, and by that time first the owner is active, and second, the owner is hardly going to unscreen spam on purpose unless there's a bigger problem) then there should be a sitewide setting to put up a CAPTCHA upon the attempted anonymous comments to those journals.

Now the definition of "inactive" for the purposes of probably not actively gardening journal comments. This should be something that can be adjusted on the administrative end of things should it not be got right on the first try. As a first attempt:

No new or edited entries in personal journal
No new or edited community entries? (Can we track this?)
No new or edited comments (from the journal, not to the journal, either in their own journal or abroad) (can we track this?)
No active login sessions

... for at least 60 days? Doing anything that touches one of the above things would start the clock over again. If someone logs in, leaves a comment in a community, deletes the comment, and logs out, that would restart the clock. If someone leaves themselves logged in after doing that, they would have until that login automatically expires before the clock starts.