User-submitted content?

Pardon my lack of knowledge of coding… But my idea is to have an anonymous submission form on the homepage (just a simple text form). Users will submit the text, and it will go to the main page and update: Similar to content on reddit or a facebook feed, but anonymous and text-based. How do I code this or how can I get the code? Please help.

Hi Zuq. Welcome to SitePoint. :slight_smile:

Coding aside, if you do this I suspect you will find your home page quickly flooded with a tsunami of spam. Are you prepared for that? (It’s worth asking this before you head too far down this path.)

As this is really a code issue, I’m moving this from Content to another forum. Normally (unless you are a programmer) this sort of thing is handled by some kind of content management system, so let’s try that forum. :slight_smile:

Thanks Ralph. And well, that’s true, good point. but what about possibly approving/denying the anonymously-submitted posts? ie: wimp.com

Edit: Another part of my idea is that the higher rated/most commented posts go to the top of the selected category

Yep, you can definitely do that. But it will be a fulltime job. Spammers are merciless, I’m afraid. :frowning:

As for post ratings etc. I’m sure there will be a CMS out there that has a plugin for this, so let’s see what others suggest. WordPress probably has one, but I’m not sure.

Yes and I would suggest that if you do this, you also need to add some sort of Captcha as well as a “flag this post” feature. Spammers don’t do this stuff by hand, they automate scripts and they will hammer your site until you prevent them from doing so.

That’s a good idea too, thanks. I got the concept down, but I’m so young and inexperienced, so I don’t know how I would code this… I appreciate the help. Here’s an image for the concept visually:

Test1 is the user-submitted text that will be displayed above “test2, test3, and test4.” The archive is there so that maybe by some chance I wouldn’t have to know all of that database coding, or I could just go without a archive and the messages would be deleted after x number of days. Any input?

Captcha’s from my experience don’t really stop any spam. Bots are getting more sophisticated with some of the more ingenious ones actually performing their own Optical Character Recognition, basically reading it for themselves rather than using a ‘mechanical turk’ API (humans being paid 0.1cents to post or read a link) are imposibble to stop.

A member on another site recently discovered that his test forum running on a home PC completely off the Google radar just sitting there on the end on an IP was getting spam posts regulary so do not underestimate how determined they can can be lol!

Regexing for specific keywords (or URLs) in the visitors post that are un-related to the thread/ topic can be used as a trigger to deny the post being published or flag it for deletion before Googlebot sees it. It makes for a more friendly site where genuine users can post links without hassle but is not overly difficult or time consuming to maintain. I’ve got a ‘post a comment’ feature on the Lovelogic.net radio station set up that works along these lines with a few surprise tweeks coming soon :wink:

Of course many just say no to links alltogether and strip out anything between the marker tags like this ‘/<(.+?)>/’ because spammy or not, any outbound links do lead visitors away the site especially if the content is poor. The SEO gurus will also probably have something to say about the horrors of outbound links affecting page ranking as well.