Discuss This! administrator settings

Introduction

Available under /admin/settings/discussthis, the administrator can define how the Discuss This! module shall behave.

At this time there are 3 parts to the settings:

• The settings that appear on the node,
• The settings used when new topics are created, and
• The settings used to attach Discuss This! to different node types1.

Discuss This! Node settings

Auto-complete node names

When this checkbox is set, the Drupal auto-complete feature is used to help you find the forum post you want to attach to a node you are creating or editing.

IMPORTANT

Note that this feature requires searching all the nodes on their title. With a large number of nodes, you may want to either not use this feature or add an index on the title only.

By default, Discuss This! attaches new forum posts to nodes when they are created via the Discuss This! link appearing on the node. Yet, at times, you may want to create a new node and attach that node to an existing discussion. In that case, when creating that node (or editing an existing node), enter the name or the identifier of the forum post to attach to.

Discuss This! link

At the time Discuss This! is enabled and a set of node types is selected, a link appears on your pages (usually at the bottom.) That link defaults to Discuss This!.

If you want to entice your users a little more, you may want to use something a little more dynamic that the name of the module. This text field let you do just that.

Participate Link

When a user goes to a page that already has a Dicuss This! post associated with it, a link is created with a different text than the default Discuss This! text. This is important because in this case the user is sent to a different page when he clicks the link and he is expected to continue the discussion rather than starting it.

This link defaults to Participate in this discussion.

New user message

Whenever an anonymous user comes to one of your pages where Discuss This! is allowed by only for registered users, this extra message is appended to the Discuss This! or Participate message.

This should tell the user that if he clicks on this link he will be redirected to either log in his account or register a new account.

You may want to change the message so it lets your users know that the registration requires your approval or that they have to request for an account instead of just getting it automatically.

Show comment counts

The Discuss This! link is shown when there are no posts yet (i.e. the page is not attached to a forum post yet.)

When the Participate link is shown, however, it is because some people have posted something about that page. This checkbox can be set to show the users how many comments were posted on that particular link.

Note that on websites that have a lot of traffic, not checking this may save some CPU time to your server.

Login/Register link for anonymous users

Whenever an anonymous user visits your site he may not have the right to post a comment. In that case, the default is to hide the link since clicking on it would otherwise send the user to a page with an access denied error.

This flag can be turned on to offer a link to the User Log In page instead of the Discuss This! form. It will also include a Destination link so once the user is logged in, he's sent to the Discuss This! form immediately.

In regard to users registering, we still need to implement a system that remembers to ask the user to go back to the right page. We can do so by adding a hidden field to the registration page and an entry in the user account.

Number of comments

Once a page was commented via the Discuss This! module, those comments are available for display in the node. This count is used to append the comments at the end of the node body.

Set the count to zero (0) in order to turn off this feature.

The display of the comments uses the same features as the forum comment settings. At this point you cannot choose different display settings for the Discuss This! comments.

Discuss This! post settings

Discuss This! comment form title

The comment form is shown to the first user who posts a discussion on one of your posts. You can set the title of that form using this field. By default, this form has no title.

Author of newly created Forum discussion

This field let you choose who to assign to the newly created forum discussion.

IMPORTANT

In order to not lose2 some of the content of the nodes being discussed, it is suggested that the users who can be assigned a new forum discussion node has similar or higher permissions on the post content so the filter can be set to one that does not filter out part of the content.

There are currently three options.

A specific author

Enter the name of the user who will be assigned to the new posts. Please, avoid using the administrator.

In this case, the format is selected as specified below.

The author of the page being discussed

Enter one asterisk (*) as the name of the author. This means the author of the existing node is to be used. This is the easiest option since it ensures that the post is properly formatted since the format is copied as is since that does no represent a security issue!

The user posting the comment

When you leave the field empty, the user who is starting the discussion is used as the author of the new forum post.

In this case, the format is selected as specified below.

Title for newly created Forum discussions

This entry defines the title of the new Discuss This! forum discussion.

This field supports the token module that will replace tags as expected. You can, for instance, include the title of the node being commented with [node-title].

The default is:

Discussion about [node-title]

Template for auto-created Forum discussions

The new post created in the Discuss This! forum discussion is created using this template.

It is usual to include the node teaser and other things such as a link back to the node being discussed. The following is an example of Discuss This! post template:

Following is a discussion on the [node-type-name] item titled: [node-link].
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments! I'd  to hear what you have to say.

The page being discussed here starts like this:

[node-teaser]

Thank you.
Alexis W.
[site-url]

Posted by user [user-name] (#[user-id])

The tokens available for replacements are listed below the last text field.

Node type & forum selection

This last field set let you choose which of the node types will receive a Discuss This! link and comments. By default, none of the types are selected.

Note that the Forum type is automatically hidden since it is not acceptable to discuss a discussion 3.

Once a type is selected, two drop down entries appear. The first lists the formats. The second lists the forum topics.

Format selection

The format selection let you force the format of a discussion post.

Note that the format may be degraded to the Default format if the user attached to the discussion post does not have enough permission to use the format specified here.

All the formats available are shown in the list since the administrator has access to all the formats.

IMPORTANT

This format specification is ignored when the Author of newly created Forum discussions is set to an asterisk (*). This is because using the format of the original node is safe as long as the author is kept the same between the two posts.

Forum Topic selection

The selection of a forum topic is mandatory. At least one topic must have been created for this selection to be possible. The topics are what appears on your /forum page.

If you do not yet have a topic, you will have to go to the forum interface and create one or more. It is usual to call that topic something similar to "Website Discussions."

• 1. Note that the Forum type is treated specially here.
• 2. Note that you don't exactly lose the content. It will just be filtered with an input format that may be stronger that the filter used on the original node.
• 3. Although I think that it would work just fine to let people discuss forum discussions, there could be weird issues. Also, it is probably not useful and likely to cause confusion to users!