How to Disable Commenting on Custom Activity Types?

Shadowdare

I would like to disable commenting on Article and ArticleComment activity types.

I have defined those activity types in the Article app's structure.php file with:

$ActivityModel = new ActivityModel();
$ActivityModel->DefineType('Article');
$ActivityModel->DefineType('ArticleComment');

This creates two new rows in the GDN_ActivityType table with the AllowComments field set to the default of 0 (false).

When I insert a new activity with either the Article or the ArticleComment activity type, I can still leave a comment on the activities when comments shouldn't be allowed. It's the same on both an admin account and a normal user account.

I see that the comments link for activities doesn't have any logic to hide the link if AllowComments is set to false. Reference: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/applications/dashboard/views/activity/helper_functions.php#L82

Is the AllowComments property being ignored and simply not used in the code, or is there another way to do this?

Linc

Wow, yeah, looks like AllowComments is a dummy db field that either didn't get implemented or got supplanted by a calculated value. I don't have a good suggestion on this one.

hgtonight

Huh, I didn't even think about this when I was creating new activity types. Good find @Shadowdare.

businessdad

Possible trick: implement a handler for ActivityController_AfterActivityBody. In it, set the following:

// Keep $ID empty (line 75)
$Sender->EventArguments['Activity']->SharedNotifyUserID = null;
// Keep $ID empty (line 77)
$Sender->EventArguments['Activity']->CommentNotifyUserID = null;
// At this point $SharedString should be empty as well. Set $Activity->NotifyUserID to 
// any value greater than zero
$Sender->EventArguments['Activity']->NotifyUserID = 12345;

// Now $AllowComments = $Activity->NotifyUserID < 0 || $SharedString; should 
// always return false, disabling comments