Question

I’m planning to create a custom system for comments. I was wondering about comment moderation. For approving comments, is it as simple as just creating a field called “Moderated” in MySQL?

What’s a good suggestion for countering spam? Akismat?

Answer 1

If you design your columns to have a status column, so only approved comments are displayed, then you could use a DATETIME column called approved date:

COMMENTS table

• comment_id, INT, primary key
• comment_detail, VARCHAR
• approved_date, DATETIME, NULL

This way, you know it was approved and when. But it also relies on staff to approve things before they are visible. It’s unclear if there are other statuses involved in your proposed comment system – if there are, it might require a COMMENT_STATUS_CODE table.