Sunday, 19th October 2003
HTMLifying user input
I’ve added a comment system to my new Kansas blog. Since the target audience for that site is friends and family rather than fellow web developers, I’ve taken a very different approach to processing the input from comments. While this blog insists upon valid XHTML and gives very little help to comment posters aside from highlighting validation problems, my new site’s comment system takes the more traditional root of disallowing HTML while automatically converting line breaks and links.
[... 602 words]Managing Social Software
Moderation is a topic that goes hand in hand with online communities, but despite being a highly complex matter it is rarely given the coverage it deserves. That’s all set to change now thanks to Tom Coates’ excellent new blog, Everything in Moderation. The site’s topic is “creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content”, and the content posted so far easily lives up to that claim. Of particular interest are the introductory post, the definitions of the four principle types of moderation and a fascinating entry about using stealth moderation tactics to deter abusive posters. Definitely one for the blogroll (at least once it starts pinging blo.gs).
Converting links without regular expressions
I pair-programmed this code with Natalie just over a month ago, and I’ve now added it to my Kansas blog simplified comments system as mentioned earlier.
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