Problems with comments.py

Hi,

I'm upgrading from pb 1.0 to 1.2.1 and I've noticed some problems  
with comments.py.  Some are old, some are new, but I wanted to bring  
them up.  I've got patches for some, as well.

1. There doesn't seem to be any consistent philosophy about what  
errors should be reported to the user and what should go to logs.  If  
a comment couldn't be saved because the comments file couldn't be  
opened, there's no message to the user, just a log message, despite  
the fact that the user's comment will be lost.  OTOH, when I submit a  
comment and e-mail isn't set up correctly I see this message:

     Error sending mail: SMTP instance has no attribute 'sock'Comment
     submitted. Thanks!

Some random user commenting on my blog shouldn't be told about  
problems with my e-mail configuration.

Basically, if a comment is rejected or fails to be saved, the user  
should be told so.  If it's due to an internal error, the user should  
be told so, but not get detailed info -- maybe a numerical or  
symbolic code to indicate which line the error came from.

2.  The new way of having story.html displayed for comments makes it  
impossible to put status/error messages at the top of the page where  
they're easiest to see.  So the user has to scroll down beyond the  
story to even know that there was a problem with a comment.  It was  
also annoying that this behavior changed without notice between 1.0  
and 1.2.1.

3.  It's hard to style status/error messages.  If a message is  
output, $comment_message should expand to a <div  
style="commenterrormsg">...</div> block.  If no message is output it  
should expand to an empty string.  That makes it easy to incorporate  
the error message output in your flavour files without having them  
take up space, and it makes them easier to style as well.

4.  Actually, the whole "status message" approach to error handling  
is bogus.  It's annoying to have to try to weave error handling into  
flavour files that are also supposed to handle non-error cases.  It  
would make more sense to have a comment-error.html file where you can  
handle errors properly.

5.  If a comment is entered without an e-mail address then crashes  
happen.  Even worse, they corrupted my comments database.  The plugin  
needs to transform and validate its input *before* attempting to  
write it to the database.  Code like:
     cfile.write(makeXMLField('title',comment))
     cfile.write(makeXMLField('author',comment))
     cfile.write(makeXMLField('link',comment))
is dangerous because if the second makeXMLField call fails then the  
file has been partially written!  All transformations should be done  
before the file is written to.  Incidentally, the fix for this crash  
is simple.  In the cb_prepare function you need to add these lines  
after the "if form.has_key('email')" statement:
         else:
             cdict['email'] = ''

6.  I've added a "magic word" feature to comments.py that requires  
the user to type some magic word to validate that they're not a  
spammer.  It's really simple, not dynamic, not industrial-strength,  
but if everybody out there chose a different word and a different way  
of *asking for* the word it would make comment spamming much harder.   
Is this something you'd be interested in integrating?

Ok, I guess that's it for now.  I'm sorry if I came off as sounding  
negative.  I actually like pb a lot and I'm grateful for the time you  
guys spend on it.  If you agree with the things I've said above but  
don't have the time to fix them then I can put together patches.

Cheers,
-n8

PS.  Please CC me with replies.

--
 >>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
 >>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->




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