Comment Notify
Notifies users about new comments on pages where they have commented.
Features
- mail anonymous users about comment follow-ups
- mail registered users about comment follow-ups
- allow users to unsubscribe from a specific post followup with a single click
- to allow registered users to preset their follow-up setting in their profile
The feature
- to keep anonymous user data persistent in a cookie - is implemented in comment_info and is in the core of Drupal6.x
History
Since I started using and implementing Drupal as a CMS and also on blog sites I wondered why there is no module to implement the profane comment follow up e-mail that I knew from Movable Type and Wordpress.
However, there are a lot of features in modules like "subscription" and "notify" - which both let you basically subscribe to content of ANY kind, which is a very generic feature.
None of the modules, hacks and tips I ran across however offered everything ready-to-go for anonymous users as well - everyone required the user to be created prior to comment notification, which is a different approach ( "Make it easier to signup and only talk to those that take the extra minute to sign up")
The long waiting userbase
A lot of questions and requirements were posted, to list just a few
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/anonymous_commenting_in_drupal_4_5...
no changes or updates since may
http://drupal.org/node/64920
answer: "just make signup easier" :-/
http://drupal.org/node/76711
=> answer: "use subscriptions module" - hey and the anons?
Both notify and subscription were created in 2003.
Nobody that was able to create a drupal mod obviously has since understood the
urgent need to drive one-time users that comment back to you site to convert them
to real registered users... this conversion step is one essential one in building a blog comment community.
Design issues
Design issues:
1) "Quick Unsubsribe" works by clicking a single link like mydomain.com/comment_notify/disable/89023890423809
2) a notification mail shall ONLY be sent at the time a comment is published, to avoid users getting nagged when comment spam hits your moderation queue.. therefore a clean "publish" hook call from comment is needed, which isn't there yet
Compatible changes to "comment" module
1) hook-chaos
The module "comment" needs to signal the final "publish" to it's hooks,
but only calls "update","insert" and "moderate" and even "publish" sometimes
in variuous fashions and not even passes the "comment" status to it's sub hooks.
This is a bad design control flow as well as a real performance issues as sub hooks would
neet to re-select the just created comment from the database (see http://drupal.org/node/50827)
This will be fixed by implementing the single "publish" hook in 2 essential places in 2-3 extra lines
this change is backwards compatible
2) notify flag in comment data model
the wish to notify on a per node basis will be implemented as a single flag in the datamodel
which will be set at the comment time and REset with the QUICKURL
this means that QUICKURL is not really a security-relevant thing, as it only allows update of that
single flag from external system.
this change is backwards compatible
Usefull other mods
the modules to be used together with comment_notify are
comment_info
for keeping commenter credentials persistent in a cookie
(not required but very essentially needed!)
Related modules that just don't do the job
commentmail
This module is for sending emails to registered users. It includes a
custom "mail" content type, but can also be used to add emailing to any
existing content type.
notify
subscription only for reg'ed users
subscriptions
subscription only for reg'ed users
How to distinguish calls to user validate?
Like this module?
Client projects always come first.
But you can contact me to help to fund development and faster migration to new versions via a donation of your choice.
Releases
| Official releases | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.x-1.6 | 2008-Mar-19 | 10.84 KB | Download · Release notes | Recommended for 5.x |  |
| Development snapshots | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.x-1.x-dev | 2008-May-08 | 10.94 KB | Download · Release notes | Development snapshot |  |