Lorenz Quack wrote:
But I do think captchas are fine if they help reduce the spam.
I'm not sure about this. Some of the spam comments seem to be from bots, but there are (were?) a lot of comments like "hgjnyhh". I don't think they are from bots. Then, there are comments posting complete example programs then a few criticizing that program or asking for help for their programming problems. (eg. comments of Font.render).
So, thats not spam, but I think they should go elsewhere. It's interesting how to get "'truly' transparent" text, but that should be posted in a wiki or snippets or cookbook or howewer you call it. Maybe you could add a comment with a link to that snippet post (if links would work).
If you allow comments for anonymous on docs or elsewhere, you have to care for it. So, remove spam directly, add comments that should be included to the docs directly (or mark them, so its easier to find them later). Maybe find someone who could help there and give him restricted rights for these jobs.
Another way would be to call it not "add comment" but "suggest improvement", and to add some functions to easily manage it. A suggested improvement would be checked by some admin or moderator and then either marked as "accepted" (-> will be displayed like a comment until included to the docs) or "not accepted" (-> could stay for a while on an extra side so users could write it to the wiki or so). Spam would be directly deleted. I think there aren't so many new comments per month and if people know what happens with their suggestions, they'd post example programs directly elsewhere. That would keep the docs clean, but is a bit more work and won't be to everyone's liking.
And if using captchas, don't take those with images noone can read. Take something like "what is 2+5?" or so. As long as the bots don't know this format, it will be fine.
The questions are: - Should all comments be deleted or included to the docs some day? - Should the docs just be an api reference or more? Julian