I use XOOPS as a Blog with News Module as the main blogging module.

I have many visitors who do not wish to register just to post comments.

They instead post comments as 'anonymous user/guest'.

When many post as 'anonymous user/guest', the thread becomes flooded, confused and hotchpotch since the posters become unambigious.

Can we have a feature like the mainstream blogging tools have like:

Option to enter Name, Email and URL while posting comments without registering. And also the option to post anonymously can be preserved.

As soon as somebody reads a news article and presses the comments button, the form should have 'name, email and URL as well as the comments text area' along with an option to post anonymously. However, when the user fills in his name, email and url and writes his comments and posts it, he can be taken to a extended standard registration form.

This will solve many problems and even encourage visitors to register since registration will not involve a separate willful procedure to register. Instead, an action of posting comments can induce the visitor into registering.

Nowadays, nobody wants to undergo the process of registering unless the site is very important or has some resource they really want and cannot get without registering. For casual blogs, nobody will ever take the pain of registering just to post A SINGLE COMMENT.

Hope I made myself understood.

Regards,
Jagan aka Fireater.

You could add this to the feature request tracker on sourceforge net.

However i see one problem with this. If you run a site that allows registration and this kind of posting at the same time then guests could use names of people already registered or someone might register a name later and in both cases it would look like that person made this comment.

Won't a quick check with the registered userbase return a message asking the poster to choose another name/nick?

The Rank can be shown as 'unregistered guest' or something like that. Also, an Icon to show that the user is UNAUTHENTICATED can also be used.

Today, the moving and fleeting population of visitors hopping from one blog to another make up upto 90% of a blog's visitorship. Hardly 10% can be retained as regular visitors who can be cajoled to register.

This is therefore Important IMHO.

I am posting a feature request at sourceforge as directed, Thank you!

Quote:

This does happen, but its a good option to have and seems to work well on 'casual reading' sites. I like it better than completely anonymous comments, sort of a compromise for ease of use.

If the IP is logged out of user site then it should be pretty easy for admin to spot most pretenders.

Quote:

In CBB usernames of users who post without logging in appear as Guest_UsernameEnteredByAnonymous User.

Not to forget to add CAPTCHA authentication to ward off Spam comments from Bots.

Imagine this: User comes to a XOOPS powered Blog, reads a news article and tries to comment, but is put off by the need to register first. He goes away, never to return.

He has not been successfully engaged and encouraged to participate in the discussion. The need to register makes many to drop the whole idea of commentating.

Right now XOOPS gives three options:
1. Undergo the whole registration process irrespective of whether you plan to revisit or not.
2. Or post as 'anonymous/guest'.
3. Just go away.

Almost everybody chooses 3, a few go in for commenting as anonymous, but do not return.

Authors go to great extent to pagerank their sites and improve search engine visibility. They try to bring in more traffic, but if they cannot succeed in building interaction with their readers, these efforts will go waste and they will continously hunt for more readers as the old drift away. Retaining visitors is more important than finding new readers.

Xoops has to change and evolve.

Blogs are becoming a hallmark of web 2, empowering personal publishing, political dissent, punditry and so on.
Blogs like Instapundit, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs are succeeding in challenging the fate of elections and so on. This movement is now obvious to Xoops. Hardly 0.1 % of blogging is done on Xoops. Why not? XOOPS does have everything needed for Blogging, except for a few things like pingback and trackback (athough somebody did make a module for it, but it is stalled now, also the wordpress module)

ALL other software/platforms/tools like Blogger, Wordpress, My Journal, MovableType, SquareSpace, b2evolution, Blog:CMS, UBlog, .Text, BlogWare and Xaraya provide for easy guest commenting under their own name.

Unless XOOPS succeeds in positioning itself as a capable Blogging platform, a huge oppurtunity is lost. XOOPS has the core features, just has to implement a few more tweaks and thats it.

1. CAPTCHA authentication
2. Trackback/pingback
3. Pinging of Blog Indexes
4. Easier User Commenting system

The non-consideration of this feature is preventing XOOPS from being used as a serious blogging tool instead of just a community builder.

As the web 2.0 moves away from monolithic community sites to multiple personal blogs with interactivity like backtracks and so on, XOOPS stands to loose.

Meanwhile, Drupal, Mambo and other cutting edge CMS have take a clue from wordpress and have implemented much of the mainstream blogging tools (like livejournal, etc) into their own functionality.

Admins may kindly review this feature please!

Jagan.

Personally I'd see this as a chance for spammers to cause havoc on a site.

I'm not sure this is a good feature at all.

Any interested people would only need to spend a few seconds to sign up to a site.

Wordpress, drupal and mambo have captcha mechanisms to deal with spam.

Registering to post is soooo old now. Things should be easy.

Need to think out of the box.

Having an option won't hurt. It need not be turned on by default, only those who want it can activate it.

This will bring XOOPS into the Blogging community big way. And thats a whole lot of users!

Xoops should be versatile and not be tied down to building 'communities' since in the near future, Blogging will morph into communities, interest groups and foci.