I have run up into a wall in translating my inline comment form hacks to Blogger BETA code. The translation is done, but the forms don’t really work. Why not? The submission always produces an error. A quick analysis shows that Blogger BETA comment pages generate auth keys now to prevent non-Blogger forms from spoofing info (just what this hack tries to do). While this is a security feature, it makes this hack (as it currently is) pretty useless.

So what am I going to do? I am going to attempt the creation of an offsite PHP script to scrape the auth key out of the form code (surprised?). Based on how these systems usually work, it should fix the problem if this is then included (via JavaScript) into the comment form code. What this does mean is that the comment form will require JavaScript to fuction, and so I will probably just translate the more popular asynchronous version which does already anyway (since the purpose of keeping the other version alive was to have one that didn’t require JavaScript).

If this approach is successful I will create a similar partner script to enable the inline comment forms to work with word verification, something many people have asked for in the past.

So I’m not giving up just yet, but the process may take longer than I had anticipated. To see the literally-translated hack with error messages see my BETA test blog.