How about an article subpage for comments by unregistered visitors ?

[Dan Nessett]

Wow, thats alot. It sounds more like Larry was asking someone to completely revamp CZ.

As far as the Special:RequestAccount page goes, the basics of what he wants shouldn't be to hard.
There's alot of stuff in the Desirements and Heroic efforts section that seems like it would be better to wait until the charter is finished, mostly because he seems to be asking for changes that would depend on a change in the CZ infrastructure.

I can do, or can learn to do, pretty much everything Larry is asking for, but not without access to Localsettings.php and the code for the Special:RequestAccount page. Hayford, if you can find that message containing the link I can copy and paste it to my friends wiki for testing, and start working on it there. But the creating user groups and pretty much everything Larry asked for other than the change to Special:RequestAccount can't be done by anyone without access to Localsettings.php.

Drew

You may want to wait a bit before putting a lot of work into revamping the Special:RequestAccount page, because: 1) Larry wrote that piece two years ago when he was driving CZ. That seems to be no longer the case. Getting some buy-in from the current CZers about how the registration page should look would give you some confidence that your changes would meet their requirements. 2) Greg is his own man and I wouldn't presume to speak for him, but I would be very surprised if he gave you access to LocalSettings on the live wikis. You can bring the wiki down by mis-configuring it. 3) CZ is not a standard MW distribution. There are changes made to the include files and some of its functionality is implemented in special extensions. So, you can't simply modify a standard MW 1.13.2 code base. You have to modify the version that CZ runs.

[Drew R. Smith]

I would be very surprised if he gave you access to LocalSettings on the live wikis

I would be two! I was just pointing out that only someone with access would be able to make the changes.

[Arne Eickenberg]

I haven't read the replies, so this goes directly to OP Milton: I had the same idea a few years ago, and I'm all for it. A specialist actually contacted me on one of my articles, but it was quite hard for him, because he had to switch to the article history, find my name, navigate to my user page, then google for my name, search for the e-mail address etc.

I'm open to debate the system for visitor comments. It shouldn't be a subpage or a second discussion page. This would be vandalized sooner or later, and it would divert energy for maintenance. So it could rather be an online comment/email form incl. captcha to send a message to an author, maybe via a CZ "constable office". There needs to be a spam filter nonetheless, and if the visitors actually enter the topic/article in the subject heading, the message is likely to reach the right author via a constable. Maybe we can also leave out the constable completely and find a fully automated system, like a pop-up menu to select authors/articles to contact/comment on. Such an automated system should also be able to check, if the email address entered in the online comment form is valid. If it's not, the message would be treated as spam.

[Arne Eickenberg]

I haven't read the replies, so this goes directly to OP Milton: I had the same idea a few years ago, and I'm all for it. A specialist actually contacted me on one of my articles, but it was quite hard for him, because he had to switch to the article history, find my name, navigate to my user page, then google for my name, search for the e-mail address etc.

I'm open to debate the system for visitor comments. It shouldn't be a subpage or a second discussion page. This would be vandalized sooner or later, and it would divert energy for maintenance. So it could rather be an online comment/email form incl. captcha to send a message to an author, maybe via a CZ "constable office". There needs to be a spam filter nonetheless, and if the visitors actually enter the topic/article in the subject heading, the message is likely to reach the right author via a constable. Maybe we can also leave out the constable completely and find a fully automated system, like a pop-up menu to select authors/articles to contact/comment on. Such an automated system should also be able to check, if the email address entered in the online comment form is valid. If it's not, the message would be treated as spam.

Suggestion for a comment system:

(1) there is a "Comment" link in the left CZ column, e.g. under "Permanent link".
(2) Clicking it leads to a special CZ page, with an online email/comment form, containing:
(a) Subject heading 1: automatically generated from the referral, e.g. "RE: CZ article 'Biology'"
(b) Recipient 1: automatically generated, i.e. send one copy of the message to the CZ editor in charge of the article
(c) Recipient 2: one of the article's authors, to be selected by the anonymous commenter from a pop-up menu that only contains the authors that actually worked on the article, sorted by the number and/or the scope of their edits, most active first
(d) Subject heading 2: topic of the comment to be typed-in by the commenter
(e) Field where the commenter needs to enter his e-mail address
(f) Field to repeat the e-mail address
(g) Optional field for the commenter to enter his real name
(h) Text field for the message
(i) CAPTCHA

Send button. A copy of the message will be sent to the supplied commenter's email address. If the message returns with permanent errors, the CZ system will not forward the message to the editor and the selected author.

[Daniel Mietchen]

I haven't read the replies, so this goes directly to OP Milton: I had the same idea a few years ago, and I'm all for it. A specialist actually contacted me on one of my articles, but it was quite hard for him, because he had to switch to the article history, find my name, navigate to my user page, then google for my name, search for the e-mail address etc.

I'm open to debate the system for visitor comments. It shouldn't be a subpage or a second discussion page. This would be vandalized sooner or later, and it would divert energy for maintenance. So it could rather be an online comment/email form incl. captcha to send a message to an author, maybe via a CZ "constable office". There needs to be a spam filter nonetheless, and if the visitors actually enter the topic/article in the subject heading, the message is likely to reach the right author via a constable. Maybe we can also leave out the constable completely and find a fully automated system, like a pop-up menu to select authors/articles to contact/comment on. Such an automated system should also be able to check, if the email address entered in the online comment form is valid. If it's not, the message would be treated as spam.

Suggestion for a comment system:

(1) there is a "Comment" link in the left CZ column, e.g. under "Permanent link".
(2) Clicking it leads to a special CZ page, with an online email/comment form, containing:
(a) Subject heading 1: automatically generated from the referral, e.g. "RE: CZ article 'Biology'"
(b) Recipient 1: automatically generated, i.e. send one copy of the message to the CZ editor in charge of the article
(c) Recipient 2: one of the article's authors, to be selected by the anonymous commenter from a pop-up menu that only contains the authors that actually worked on the article, sorted by the number and/or the scope of their edits, most active first
(d) Subject heading 2: topic of the comment to be typed-in by the commenter
(e) Field where the commenter needs to enter his e-mail address
(f) Field to repeat the e-mail address
(g) Optional field for the commenter to enter his real name
(h) Text field for the message
(i) CAPTCHA

Send button. A copy of the message will be sent to the supplied commenter's email address. If the message returns with permanent errors, the CZ system will not forward the message to the editor and the selected author.

I like this suggestion.

[Milton Beychok]

I like Arne's idea ... very much.

Milt Beychok