Geeklog Forums

Hello. I am trying to get to the bottom of a conspiracy theory about Groklaw.net, a site that is likely the largest Geeklog online.
Some malcontents claim that their posts are only visible to them. That is to say that their posts were deleted as far as Earth is concerned, yet when they login with their username, there it is. Bug? Feature? Hack?
Thanks in advance for any useful info on this.
Tim Ransom

A vanilla install of Geeklog does not have the capability to selectively display comments to some users but not others. A Hack to implement what you described would be well within the realm of possibility. That being said, I seriuosly doubt Groklaw would do that.

Pretty boring (and tame) as far as conspiracy theories go...

-Vinny

So could this be a bug or maybe a database corruption problem? Several reliable people have confirmed the behavior.

One person has suggested it could be done like thus:

Geeklog has a post access rights system that goes something like this:

Access Rights

Owner: whoever
Group:
Permissions:
R = read, E = edit, edit rights assume read rights

Owner Group Members Anonymous
RE RE R R

I imagine the "hidden posts" look like this:

Owner Group Members Anonymous
RE RE R R
x

Whereas a normal post would look like this:
Owner Group Members Anonymous
RE RE R R
x x x x

They probably just locked that article out with existing features of geeklog, not quite as nefarious as hacking the source to "hide" by IP address...

I think they have implimented and were talking about a custom grading system on the comments much like SlashDot does.

This would be so that relevent comments are more likely to be seen than troll comments.

Maybe these two items are related.

Comments inherit permissions from the story they are attached to. There is no way to get Geeklog to do what you are saying out-of-the-box.

Turias is correct, comments don't have access rights like articles, links, etc. Like I said before. There is no way to do this with vanilla Geeklog install.

-Vinny

email quote from geeklog-devel

Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 12:10:04 +0200
From: Niels Leenheer
To: geeklog-devel@lists.geeklog.net
Subject: [geeklog-devel] Misc additions
Reply-To: geeklog-devel@lists.geeklog.net

-snip
3) The ability for selected moderators to hide comments from public
view. This is dependant on a new permission. These moderators
are not allowed to delete comments. It basically creates two levels
of moderators. Deleting is only allowed by the higher group of
moderators.

In addition to this, the comments will be kept visible to the user
who posted the comment either based on the IP (anon users) or
the user id (logged in users). To prevent users from reposting the
same comment after they notice it is hidden.

-snip

right - thats an extract of a email exchange outlining some future ideas

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