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You probably haven't seen too many changes lately, apart from the page numbers getting broken. The reason for that is that we're working on one biggish feature and, as is the way of these things, it turned out that it's more complicated than it looks.

That feature is photo comments.

Firstly, we know some of you won't like it; this is one of those things that people tend to have strong feelings about. So we're going to give you the option to turn it off for your photos, before we even enable it. We hope you won't want to, but you'll be able to if you wish.

Key points:

• This is not a "rate and comment" system. It's a comment system only.
• Only registered users will be able to comment on photos. Your username is associated with your comment.
• Photographers can turn commenting on or off for any or all of their shots, at any time
• Comments go live immediately, but there will be a full-blown reporting system, much like with forum posts
• Forum rules will apply to photo comments too
• Moderators can, and will, remove infringing comments
• Mods can also lock commenting on any given photo
• If a mod disables commenting on a shot, only mods can unlock them*
• If the photographer disables comments, only he can re-enable them*

*Admins will have a "master key", just in case, but we don't intend to use it. It's really there so I can unbung things if the access rights turn out to be wrongs.

We hope that this addresses most, if not all, of the concerns you might have about other comment systems you might have seen.

Progress

The configuration stuff is largely done, bar the upload form.

The reporting stuff is still to do; I'm not sure how hard that will be yet. I can do a Mickey Mouse one very quickly, but I'd like to do it so we have something we can re-use for other features later. That means diving into the guts of phpBB again

It should all be ready to go in a couple of days, but that's not a promise

Launching

When this is ready, we intend to give you all the configuration options right away, but not allow commenting. This means

• a new "options" page, where you can set the default (comments on or off) for your shots; we'll add more options to this later
• a new "Allow comments" checkbox on the upload form (checked or unchecked, depending on your default setting)
• A new "enable" or "disable" button on the photo view page, for your shots. Mods will see this on all shots.

The plan is to give everyone about a week to see this post, and to go into the settings and turn comments off if they want to. After that, we'll unhide the comments form, and logged-in users will be able to add comments to any photo where this has not been disabled.

Later improvements

Some time in the future, we'd like to give you a daily PM with all the comments on your photos. Naturally, you'll be able to turn that on or off, too.

As always, please feel free to ask questions, or to give your opinion.

I hope to have the first photo in which a person tells us about his dearly departed uncle, and the millions of dollars he had... for which he needs out help and bank account numbers to extricate it from under the grasp of some tin pot dictator.

Personally, can't wait for these comments to be enabled. Often, I have questions about a particular picture.

I'm not really a fan of the comments but I am glad they'll come with the option to turn them off.

I am curious about something. Let's say I enable them just to see how they go. After, oh I don't know, a few months I decide that the comments just aren't my thing and I turn them off. What happens to them? Put another way, if I choose to re-enable them later on, do previously posted comments come back?

As currently implemented, existing comments will remain in place but the comments form will go away. Think of it like being able to lock and unlock threads you start. Naturally, if comments break the rules, you can report them and the mods will take care of them.

Why can't we have the ability to moderate the comments on our photos ourselves? Is it a freedom of speech thing or a takes too much time to implement thing?

graphic wrote:Why can't we have the ability to moderate the comments on our photos ourselves? Is it a freedom of speech thing or a takes too much time to implement thing?

It is a way the permissions are attached to group. There are other fish to fry.

miamiair wrote:

graphic wrote:Why can't we have the ability to moderate the comments on our photos ourselves? Is it a freedom of speech thing or a takes too much time to implement thing?

It is a way the permissions are attached to group. There are other fish to fry.

Understand.

All the code changes have now gone up, and it appears that nothing broke.

Regardless of your settings, the entire comment facility is currently disabled - with the exception of admins commenting on admins' photos, for test purposes.

I intend to enable the feature fully on Wednesday (11th Jan) evening, Finnish time.

Please visit the new options panel before then and change your settings, if you don't want people commenting on your photos.

Photo comments are now enabled. Go nuts

As with posts, you can (and should) report any that you feel are in violation of the site rules, it's the same warning triangle icon as in the forum.

Please report any problems with the comments in this thread.

Photo comments all seem to be working OK. At least, there have been no major disasters since they went live I've just uploaded the code for comment notifications.

What it does

The system will send you a PM once a day, telling you about any photos of yours, and/or any photos you commented on, that have new comments. If there aren't any photos that fit that description, you won't get a PM.

If you're the last commenter on a photo, you won't see it in your notification; you're assumed to have read all the comments You're notified about new comments since the later of:

* your last comment on the photo
* the last time the job ran (roughly 24 hours ago)

Options

Notifications for both "your photos" and "photos you commented on" are on by default. You should have a new section in your photo options, where you can turn either of these options on or off.

Bedding in

The job runs with the usual daily tasks; I honestly don't know what time that happens The first time it runs, it will notify about all comments that have been made so far - that's about 80-100. After that, it'll settle down into notifying about that day's comments only.

I'll be keeping an eye on this. If you know you have comments on your photos, and don't get a PM in the next 24 hours, let me know. Similarly, if you shouldn't get a PM but do, shout.

27 hours later I don't have a PM. I'll look into it.

No message here either, and I'm pretty sure I got one or two comments as one of them came from you Ed

Found some programming fail, fixed and re-uploaded. Same again - no messages in 24hrs means it's still horked.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:Found some programming fail, fixed and re-uploaded. Same again - no messages in 24hrs means it's still horked.

Thanks for your hard work on this project, and all projects, Ed. That goes for all of NAS!

Nosedive wrote:

ShanwickOceanic wrote:Found some programming fail, fixed and re-uploaded. Same again - no messages in 24hrs means it's still horked.

Thanks for your hard work on this project, and all projects Ed. That goes for all of NAS!

Ditto. Is there/will there be a way for DB editors to have 1st crack at the comments?

--Uploaded x date and time, "btw, this is one dumpy looking Airbus".

24hrs and another shipment of fail.

Not sure what's going on here, but we may be bumping up one of the ridiculously tight limits our hoster places on scheduled tasks. In particular "15 opened files"... depending on the definition of opened, we could hit that just by purging abandoned uploads (which also happens every 24hrs). I don't understand why those limits are in place if it's a dedicated box and the only site we can hang is ours...

...or the script is just crashing out because it's fubared.

Meh. It's on the list, but not at the top. If I get a moment I'll try splitting the jobs.

If you have photos and they have comments on them, you probably just got a PM. (Stefan and I did, anyway.) I had to slap the server around to get those to go, and the script was run manually. With luck, this will run successfully with the daily job from now on.

Future PMs won't be nearly as huge as these ones were; this first run cleared the entire backlog.

Note that, if you were the last commenter on a photo, you won't get a notification about comments on that photo. (You're assumed to have read them all!)

ShanwickOceanic wrote:If you have photos and they have comments on them, you probably just got a PM. (Stefan and I did, anyway.) I had to slap the server around to get those to go, and the script was run manually. With luck, this will run successfully with the daily job from now on.

Future PMs won't be nearly as huge as these ones were; this first run cleared the entire backlog.

Note that, if you were the last commenter on a photo, you won't get a notification about comments on that photo. (You're assumed to have read them all!)

Thanks, Ed!

I got a PM with the photos where I have commented, even though they are not mine (wish I was half as talented as the photographers here! )

It seems that the automatic job is still failing. Really thought I'd nailed this one, too.

I got one more PM, but it claimed to be from a bot - an interesting trick, given that the URL to fire this manually isn't published or linked from anywhere. (I think I know how it happened, though.) If the job had run automatically, the PM would have come from "" or "Anonymous"... and I'd have had another PM today.

There's still too much on my plate to look into this in more detail; for now, I'll fire the script manually when I remember.