We have added a few new options in LibGuides for dealing with comments. As local LibGuides sites become more popular and replace Google and Wikipedia as *the* sources of reliable information (just kiddin’, but hey – nobody knows information better than librarians, so why not?) the issues with comment spam may become a problem so we have built in a few safeguards for LibGuides administrators to deal with this.
There are now 3 modes of Comments operation in LibGuides (these are available to System Administrators under System Settings -> System-wide customization):
1) Enabled comments means the visitors can post comments without the approval of the page owner (this is how comments worked so far). The page owner will get an email with the text of the comment, so they can log on and delete the comment if they deem it inappropriate. This option is set by default, with every new LibGuides system.
2) Moderated comments. When a visitor writes a comment, it is hidden until the page owner (or an editor, or an admin) manually approves the comment. The page owner still gets an email notification that a visitor wrote a comment, and they can also see the list of comments waiting to be approved when they log on to their guide. If there are any page (or box) comments the Comments link will look like this (with the number of comments waiting to be approved in red):
3) Lastly, the system administrator can disable all page and box comments system-wide. The previous comments that were posted are not deleted – they are just hidden, so if you re-enable the comments system-wide those comments will show up again.