Until today, this website was lacking a good commenting solution. Indeed, Joomla! 1.5.1 (the CMS used for this website) is really great, but it still doesn't have a built-in commenting solution.
But I just solved this problem, installing yvComment. Besides, I installed BigoCaptcha, a plugin which purpose is to display a moving image with some text that unregistered users must copy in order to post a comment. Even better: unregistered users can post comments, but those must be moderated by myself, and I am of course notified about every new comment by e-mail.
By the way, I used BigoCaptcha for the form Create an account, so that only real persons could get an account for my website...
The hack for the registration form can be found here, but it's a French forum (sorry for non-French speakers). In my opinion, installing it with the RAR file is a quick and dirty solution, but I didn't have the courage to do it by myself!
I also modified two little files in order to disable the Powered By yvComment div block. Not so nice, I agree, but I think it's prettier this way. Since yvComment is licensed under the GPL, it's no big deal! By the way, I used the version 1.14.2 of yvComment.
I must say I do like yvComment for several reasons:
- it is free, since it is under the GPL (as is BigoCaptcha I think);
- it is written for Joomla! 1.5.x, and not Joomla! 1.0.x (just like BigoCaptcha);
- it is sober;
- it works quite well.
The second and the third reasons are what convinced me to choose yvComment and not mxComment. Indeed, when I first installed mxComment (which is very easy to install, it's true), I felt that the new buttons created by mxComment were really ugly.
But, on the other hand, I must say that installing yvComment is not so easy, and in order to have a good result, you have to spend a little more time than with mxComment. Anyway, since I prefer a good result, no matter the time and the efforts it requires, I chose yvComment.
A little useful note for Debian or Ubuntu users, who use Apache and PHP 5 for serving their Joomla! website: if you want to use Captcha, then you need to install the package php5-gd, and to restart Apache. I spent a lot of time to understand this, and I couldn't understand why Captcha was still not working.