external comments perhaps?

[jcastellese]

I want to give this question a bit of an intro... We run a site for a county news paper, and one thing we've really been battling is how to handle article comments. We currently run anonymous comments, but is we publish any stories that are half controversial, we get flooded with calls over some of the obscene comments we receive. We have been looking at adding registration, but this does create the problem of first requiring a registration system, and a new login for people to remember.

We've been working with the host (we're on a fairly unique server that coordinates with our paper), but progress has been extremely slow in development requests.

We've also looked at a number of external comment systems, and facebook probably had the best one, but we still chose to pass on it.

Today someone mentioned the idea of using our smf forum (we've had it running for a few years, so we have a ton of registered members, and the cross over traffic is pretty normal, so new registrations would be minimal).

This is something I'd love to bounce some ideas around on. I'm a regular PHP programmer, but I don't have the indepth understanding of the forum that I probably should have to create something like this without having a few discussions like thees first.

So here is my idea. Since our news site is on a separate server than our smf forum and doesn't support PHP, we'd have to iFrame the comments. Now as for linking them, this would be the tricky part. We use the RSS Feeder plugin to take our news stories and create a post in the forum for each story, So I was thinking we might be able to run a script that would do a search for the article name, and then display comments as well as an option to post.

I think matching the news article on our site to the name of the post on the forum is the only way we'd really be able to link them. But as far as the mechanics, what do you guys think about how well something like this would work?

Also, sorry is this is in the wrong section, I wasn't really sure where something like this could properly fit.