By publetariat on

For the sake of retaining site visitors and encouraging interaction, I'd like to allow anonymous visitors to post comments on articles. However, while I want to allow anonymous visitors to view Forum content, I don't want them to be able to post anything in the Forum---I'd like to preserve this as a privilege of site membership and prevent spammers from abusing the Forum.

Today, I was shocked to discover that anytime someone wants to reply to a Forum topic, this is done via a "comment" form, not a "reply" link or something similar. Since I've enabled anonymous comments on articles, it seems I've also enabled anonymous forum posts. Why would Drupal allow me to disable new Forum topics for anonymous visitors, yet still allow anonymous visitors to post replies (in the form of "comments") there?!

I considered changing permissions such that the Forum area wouldn't even be visible to anonymous visitors, but I don't see an option to do that anywhere in the Forum module configuration area nor in Permissions for the Forum module. For the time being I've changed Comment permissions such that all comments are moderated, but I'm not happy with this solution. While it will probably discourage spammers, it also discourages other site visitors from posting comments and creates more work for the site administrator in having moderate comments.

Is there any other way?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

phdhiren’s picture

phdhiren commented

consider http://drupal.org/project/comment_acl

dbeall’s picture

dbeall commented

there is a nice mod http://drupal.org/project/forum_access
it is aimed at the forums, and has nice control. I use it in D6.11

publetariat’s picture

publetariat commented

...it looks like comment_acl and forum_access are both still in development. forum_access has a stable release available for 6.x, but on the linked page I see there are still open issues with the module. I'd rather wait until all open issues have been resolved.