CUNY Academic Commons

A plugin sounds good, though I'm unsure this is something we want to expose to users at all. We have a responsibility to protect the Commons from spam, or we'll get shut down by CUNY IT.

In the specific case described in this ticket, the commenters are not logged into the Commons. So your restriction wouldn't help in this particular case.

Given this, I'd say it's something we should be able to toggle as network admins, but not something we want site owners to be able to do.

Regarding logged-in users, though, I'd be willing to consider disabling Akismet checks by default for logged-in users.

I've advised Rebecca to ask the commenters to join the Commons and log in. She may even add them as authors to the site.

Boone Gorges wrote:

Regarding logged-in users, though, I'd be willing to consider disabling Akismet checks by default for logged-in users.

I've added a new plugin disable-akismet.php to handle disabling Akismet's checks:
https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/64baed880eaf1f078aeaf725aad36d95611ddca4

This plugin is automatically enabled on sites where logged-in users are the only ones allowed to comment. Also network administrators can enable the plugin on sites where we need to disable Akismet manually.

Boone, the code isn't merged into 1.15.x branch because I wanted to know what you think of the approach. Let me know what you think.

Note: We would need to enable this plugin manually on the bmccopenpedagogy and bmcccetls sites since those sites allow anonymous users to comment.

I had suggested that to her on September 27th, but she never let me know what she was doing. I'll follow up

Boone, I've added the disable-akismet.php plugin for 1.15.11:
https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/53243a88f4445047e3886d16764fb64a9d3a0606

I've also added a note to the ACTION_REQUIRED list because the plugin will need to be manually activated on the bmccopenpedagogy and bmcccetls sites as per #11313.

Excellent, thanks!