Sounds great! I'm looking forward to it!

Hi,

This is something I actually have mostly implemented in a development version of the site. There are some issues involved, however, in how this is implemented due to potential problems with spam/malicious comments etc.

A simple solution is to only allow other gallery owners to post comments. This is great in that it mitigates the aforementioned problems (you're nice people!) but it is limiting in that it would be nice for all visitors to be able to post comments.

However, allowing anonymous users to post comments brings the spam/malicious comments issue. I have ideas for ways of mitigating this but it still needs some consideration.

It's also worth noting that some gallery owners may not wish for comments to be enabled on their items.

I think in the short term we'll just start with a trial and see how it goes.

If anyone has any comments/thoughts on this please feel free to chip in. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Thanks for bringing this issue up.

Russ

My advice, as to how it should be implemented, it to allow each individual control over approving comments.  I use to have a Yahoo! Guestbook where I had to do that (I often got advertisements for pharmaceuticals and dating sites), and that format seemed to work well.  I don't know how feasible this would be, but I'd see it working like this:  Anytime an artist logged into their gallery, they'd get a notice that they have "x" number of comments pending, then said artist could then go through and winnow the wheat from the chaff, at their discretion.  With this methodology, each artist would be responsible for managing their own comments (and thus, couldn't complain about what is, or isn't, getting posted, content-wise).

Those are good ideas. I understand the concern about spam. How about a combination of enabling comments on profile page, and a moderate button for those who wish to filter comments. I think this feature would increase traffic to the site.