Extension:Comments

Comments extension adds the &lt;comments&gt; parser hook tag to allow commenting on articles where the tag is present.

Comment actions are logged to Special:Log/comments, but by default they're hidden, just like patrol log entries.

Majority of the code fixes were done by Misza and Jack Phoenix.

Right now this extension requires MySQL DBMS, but patches to add PostgreSQL/Oracle/etc. support are more than welcome!

Dependencies

 * New database tables: Comments, Comments_block and Comments_Vote &mdash; these tables currently cannot be created by running update.php, the official MediaWiki updater script, but instead you have to create them manually!

Installation

 * 1) Download the files into $IP/extensions/Comments
 * 2) Create the three required database tables (see comments.sql for the schemas)
 * 3) Add  into the wiki's LocalSettings.php
 * 4) Installation can now be verified through the wiki's Special:Version

Usage

 * &lt;comments /&gt; — basic comment form, sufficient for most things
 * — only allows the users Derfel, Jack Phoenix and Misza to submit comments
 * — prevents users from rating comments negatively (thumb down), allowing only positive (thumb up) votes

Comments of the Day
The extension also comes with a "Comments of the Day" feature (&lt;commentsoftheday /&gt;), which by default is not enabled. You can enable this feature in the wiki's LocalSettings.php, by adding the following after the require_once line:

If the nocache argument is passed to the parser hook (like this: &lt;commentsoftheday nocache=true /&gt;), the parser hook will not use memcached and will just fetch the data from the database instead of cache. This is useful if you want to show the most up-to-date data, but it can be very server-intensive.

User rights
This extension adds two new user rights, comment (which allows posting comments) and commentadmin (which allows deleting user-posted comments). By default, everyone, even anonymous users, can post comments, but only users in the commentadmin</tt> group can delete them.

User points

 * $wgUserStatsPointValues['comment_plus']</tt> &mdash; amount of points to give out when another user gives "thumbs up" to your comment.
 * $wgUserStatsPointValues['comment_ignored']</tt> &mdash; amount of points to give out when another user adds your comments to their ignore list (Special:CommentIgnoreList).

Parameters

 * $wgCommentsDefaultAvatar</tt> &mdash; path to an image which will be displayed instead of an avatar if social tools (SocialProfile extension) aren't installed. Should be 50x50px.

Hooks
Comments extension adds two hooks,  and.

TODO list

 * 1) HTML output is not valid XHTML - would be nice if it were but we can live without that
 * 2) Would be nice if there was a Special Page that gives a overview of all uses of the comments extension on all pages (for an adminstrator to be able to moderate easier)