Comments

I've been working to add comments to this site. Everyone has their own priorities, and hence different requirements for their comment systems. This is how I want things to work:

• I want to continue managing this site primarily as a static site even though comments are inherently dynamic.
• I want to avoid JavaScript or AJAX as much as possible. Do everything server-side that can be done there.
• Minimal use of cookies, or none if I can get away with it.
• Careful control of automation. I need to implement from the get-go all possible mechanisms to thwart anyone from entering any kind of spam messages into my comment system. Two mechanisms come to mind to help that. One is a question not easily answered by automation, and another one is, with JavaScript on, to use hashcash to prove some amount of work has been done by the computer, hence making it more expensive for the spammer.

With these items in mind, I have three phases of the implementation:

1. Anonymous Comments

   Some website I have seen allow you to enter a name along with your comment, but do nothing to validate the name. This is mostly okay. I saw one comment claiming to be from Ryan Gosling, but I never believed that to be true. But what I don't like about it is that you can't be certain that any two comments claiming to be from the same person actually are. So, instead of giving any false impression, I will initially not have any name associated with the comments.

2. indieAuth for Non-Anonymous Comments

   This will allow anyone who has indieAuth set up on their web site to enter their website into a field next to the comment, log in on their own site, and retrieve their profile info to place next to their comment. Now any two comments claiming to be from the same person actually are.

3. Webmention