Joe at BitWorking.org has implemented what sounds like a great scheme for user-editable comments -- without forcing user registration.
Basically, when you leave a comment, the system spits out a URL with a unique key in it. If you visit that URL again, the system can be sure it's you, and you can edit that comment.
On the one hand, this solves the problem, but I like this about as much as I like RSS feeds for comments. It involves having to manually keep track of (ie. bookmark) each comment you make, which, come to think of it, is even more of a pain in the ass than having to subscribe to an RSS comment feed, because at least there's only one feed for each post.
There are two other solutions I can think of. First, keep shit in cookies. A hash for security along with a post id isn't too much data. And to limit the amount of data, you could always keep only the last N posts around, so at least it won't grow indefinitely. And, my cookie framework already automatically keeps a hash of the entire cookie for security, so I probably wouldn't have to keep a separate hash around for each comment id. That's awesome. I can just send a simple comment id in plain text and you can't do a damn thing about it, since you don't know how to generate my hash 
The second solution is, as part of a subscription plan, to allow someone to access a list of posts they can edit. There are a few ways to do this, but the point is that someone's e-mail address is a pretty good source of identity, so if you give them a unique ID to keep track of which they spit back to your site, you can be pretty sure it's them. Again, that's "push", not "pull", as having to bookmark pages would be.
However, I'm not sure if letting people edit comments on a weblog is a good idea in the first place. It's one thing if you're a member of a forum... there's some accountability there. But I'm reticent to allow essentially anonymous people to muck with a conversation that's in progress, potentially changing what they've said. And I'm not about to implement a weblog comment revision scheme so that there's sure to be accountability... so... best I'll do is put a comment preview back as soon as I get around to it 
Sunday, May 11, 2003
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