Geeklog Forums

I'm involved with an Independent Media Center ( Big Muddy IMC ) that's probably going to be switching over to Geeklog. We have special needs, though, and I have a quick configuration question.

What's the best way to create a Geeklog topic in which anonymous users can post their stories without waiting for the approval of a moderator?

Basically, our site (and other IMC sites) allows people to "be the media" and post their own news stories and commentary on an "open newswire" without editorial censorship. We do delete posts that are spam, etc., and we do have a separate "Features" newswire that is compiled by our own collective. But we basically want to create a newsire (i.e. a Geeklog topic) which any anonymous user can post to and have their post appear automatically on the website without waiting for admin approval.

My first thought on how to do this is by editing config.php and changing this variable:

allow_domains

But I don't know if that variable accepts wildcard symbols such as an asterisk which would allow me to tell it to allow all domains. And we don't have our test installation up yet, so I thought I'd ask for your advice in the meantime.

Do you know if setting allow_domains to *.* would make it so that anyone can post anonymously? And if so, would this eliminate the possibility of setting a specific Topic (i.e. a Features topic) to only accept posts from registered users with proper admin privileges?

I'm sure that I can puzzle all of this out on my own eventually... but if you have any previous experience/knowledge that can save me the time/energy, I would greatly appreciate it...

Love and Healing,

Treesong

Can't you just create a topic with all users or loggedin to have access rights?

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FlashYourWeb and Your Gallery with the E2 XML Media Player for Gallery2 - http://www.flashyourweb.com

It needs to let users who are anonymous / not logged in be able to post and have their posts automatically approved. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to do this using access rights in the admin panel. The closest that I can get is to make it so that unregistered users can submit posts, but those posts still need to be approved by a moderator. My goal is to remove the moderator entirely for that particular topic.

Give the users "story.submit" and/or "event.submit" permissions. That will allow them to bypass the submission queue. Or you could switch off the submission queues entirely (in config.php), but then anyone could submit stories and events.

bye, Dirk

That's basically what I'm trying to do -- to turn off the submission queue. But I only want to turn off the queue for a single topic, not for all topics.

I'll see if I can fiddle around with access rights. Maybe I can turn off submission queues, but then make it so that certain topics can only be posted to by users in a specific group. It doesn't seem that way at a glance though, so any thoughts would be appreciated.

Just as I suspected... turning the submissions queue off makes it possible for anonymous users to submit without approval, which is good. But I can't find a way (using this method) to then set a specific topic as "only people of the proper group can post to this topic." I'll keep searching, but let me know if you have any better ideas.

The rule is that if someone can see a topic, they can submit a story for that topic. And the submit permission can not be bound to a specific topic.

bye, Dirk

Hmm... so anyone who sees a topic can submit to it, and turning off the queue for such submissions can't be done on a topic-per-topic basis? Hmmmmm....

Is there any work-around for this? We have ideas for multiple Topics, but pretty much our bare minimum for this site is two specific ones:

(A) a Topic called Newswire that anonymous users can post to without a submission queue.
( a Topic called Features that only Admins can moderate and/or post to, with approval required for any submissions.

One thought that comes to mind is that maybe there's a simple hack to ensure that the Topic called Features will not appear on the list of Topics on the Contribute/Submission page. That way, anyone could post to the rest of the Topics, but not to that one, because they couldn't find it on the pull-down menu. Then, only an Admin would have permissions to move a pre-existing post over to Features. It's not a terribly graceful solution, but it might work, and might be simple.

Another thought is that maybe I could insert some sort of hack into the submission queue code so that it would look at what the topic in question is before deciding to queue or not queue. I haven't dug around yet to find that part of the code, but that solution would probably take a lot of work...

What do you think? I suppose I could go with another software for this site... but the other option that was recommended is Drupal, and I don't have any experience with it. I'd rather go with Geeklog because I have experience with this (and it seems pretty cool to me .