Motivation to manage visitor accounts
Visitor accounts can help prevent abuse of your commenting and rating system. If you set up visitor accounts, disable anonymous access.
For a variety of reasons, you may want to identify the website visitors who submit comments or ratings:
- To allow a visitor to edit or delete comments they wrote themselves (as demonstrated in the sample webpage included on the installation media)
- To prevent a visitor from rating an item more than once
- To prevent a visitor from flooding an item with comments
- To ban a visitors who acts abusively or otherwise behaves improperly
Anonymous users can still be identified through cookies, which means that in a completely anonymous environment, you can still allow visitors to edit or delete the comments they submitted themselves. However, you cannot prevent intentional abuse by visitors who delete their own cookies.
If you decide to set up accounts for visitors, SDL strongly encourages you to disable anonymous access altogether, because it may compromise the security of your login system.