Comment Important is a hard problem because it allows users to attribute arbitrary words to other people. This is the reason no "migrate" tool uploads comments -- no LJplatform allows a user to upload comments attributed to someone else.
I'm quite certain that Comment Import is the do-or-die adoption feature for DWS. If you don't have it, the only sufficient motivation to move to DWS for 99% of users will be the complete eradication of their journals, i.e. they'll only move if LJ tanks. Possible solutions/approaches: 1) Allow uploads, but MARK them as uploaded. Add a column or two to the the comments table, "uploaded BOOL" and maybe an appropriate datestamp. Display them with appropriate disclaimer "UPLOADED BY JOURNAL OWNER ON $DATE". 2) Provide means of original comment maker finding and authorizing the comments. (See azurelunatic's recent post, re doing this with OpenID.) Could be combined with the above to strike the "UPLOADED" flag. Note this will confront many users with thousands upon thousands of entries to approve. Batch approval would be both necessary and a gruesome security hole. 3) Provide original comment maker a means to proof some/all uploaded comments against an authoritative server, i.e. upload from text files then compare against livejournal.com to see if the comments match. Have *no* idea if this is feasible at all, but even if it could allow, e.g., just all the public comments to be programmatically authorized, that would reduce how many the user needed to approve manually. This would involve some serious coding. 4) Allow uploads as screened, and unscreenable and frozen, comments, so that the journal owner has them to read, but they're published to no-one else. 5) Only allow uploads directly from authorized servers, such as livejournal.com. Involves divulging one's user/pass to the importing server (so it can log in as you directly to LJ), which is another sort of security breach. That's what I got so far. Finally, a non-solution anyone thinking seriously about this problem needs to consider very hard: A) HTML snapshot of the comments on the original journal, dropped right into the body of a post on the new journal. This is a grody, grody kludge and SHOULD NOT be promoted. HOWEVER, it makes a point: there's NOTHING stopping the end user from doing this already, so any solution DWS comes up should be compared to that as a reality check! There is a tendency to make things more righteous than they need to be, and reminding yourself "Or, of course, the user could dump a scrape of the comments into the body of the new post" helps cool that fever. This is why I think importing with labeling (option 1) is quite reasonable: it's better than the kludge (option A) without sacrificing security over it. -- Siderea _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
