Running Weblogs with Slash

Posting Comments

Adjacent to the view controls, the Reply button allows users to post a top-level comment on the Story. Furthermore, each displayed comment contains a ReplyToThis link. Both bring up the Post Comment form (see Figure 6-4), which provides a field for the subject heading and a field for comment text. The form will display the parent comment, if any, above the form. This makes it convenient to copy text to quote in a reply.

Figure 6-4. The Post Comment form

Slash automatically restricts the available HTML tags in comments to a set defined by site administrators. This helps to prevent mischievous users from breaking the page’s layout by including a huge image or by adding unbalanced </TD> or </TABLE> tags. The list of allowed HTML tags can be set in the approvedtags site variable and will display just beneath the Post Comment form.

Another site variable, allow_anonymous, controls whether non-logged-in users can post comments. Even so, the Post Anonymously checkbox lets logged-in users post as “Anonymous User” (the generic user pseudonym) without having to log out. If anonymous commenting has been disallowed, non-logged-in users will get a “Sorry” message after clicking a Reply button or following a ReplytoThis link.

Slash provides four possible filters for comment text. The default, HTML Formatted, removes disallowed HTML tags but makes no other changes to the submitted ...