Nina,
You might look at IntenseDebate [1], which is a commenting system 
developed by the WordPress development team at Automattic [2].  It's 
pretty easy to install: You cut and paste some JavaScript, customize the 
CSS, and configure it as necessary.

It's all hosted, but the data is downloadable. It can be moderated and 
comments have RSS feeds that make it easy to follow threads and users. 
Users can authenticate through OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of 
other services.  There are also spam management tools, though I'm not 
sure if they have wired their Askimet plugin into it to prevent spam.  I 
can't imagine them leaving it out.

[1] http://intensedebate.com/
[2] http://automattic.com/

Hope this helps,
Shaun

On 11/22/11 12:51 PM, Nina Mchale wrote:
> Greetings, all, and apologies for cross-posting:
>
> I am looking for examples of policies/procedures/guidelines that govern
> patron/user created library web site content. If you have an official
> policy, and wouldn't mind sharing, please send it to me (whether attached
> as a document or link) off-list. If there's interest, I'll happily
> summarize for the group. Would love to hear from public libraries
> especially, but academics/specials/everyone too.
>
> Other things we'd like to know:
>
> 1. Do you require administrator moderation for user-generated content?
> 2. If you allow/require users to create web site accounts, do you limit
> account creation to your library users only, or can anyone create an
> account and add content?
> 3. If you do require user verification, how do you accomplish that?
> Manually? Automatically against the ILS?
> 4. Do you delete user accounts after a period of inactivity? If yes, how
> long?
>
> Our situation: we currently allow anyone to create an account in the
> public-facing Drupal site, but the result, no surprise, is that we have
> hundreds of junk/spam accounts and only a few legitimate users writing book
> reviews. We want to clean up the user data in the database, but also have
> some guidance/governance moving forward to prevent this in the future. We
> also want to keep the process easy for the legitimate users who want to
> create content, especially because the current iteration of the site was
> designed to encourage user-written reviews, and we do have a handful of
> people who write nice, even multi-lingual, reviews. I want them to feel
> that it's easy to contribute, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure user
> "Canadian-Pharmacy-RX" isn't interested in talking about the bestseller
> s/he just read...
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Nina
>
> Nina McHale, MA/MSLS
> Assistant Systems Administrator
> Arapahoe Library District
> milehighbrarian.net
> Facebook&  Twitter: @ninermac

-- 
Shaun D. Ellis
Digital Library Interface Developer
Firestone Library, Princeton University
voice: 609.258.1698 | [log in to unmask]