Comments

One oft requested feature for GeoNode is the ability for users to comment on individual maps and datasets. Commenting would allow users to express opinions, caveats, errors, or possible improvements related to the accuracy or usefulness of the data. Note that we should use as much of  Django's comments framework as possible and these designs should adjust to fit rather than the other way around.

Since commenting is such a standard social feature on the web, any GeoNode implementation should hew pretty closely to existing conventions—namely providing a username, timestamp, permalink, and comment text for each comment.

Anonymous Comments

While opening comments to anonymous usually (rightly) discouraged because of the poor quality of comments that result, if they are an allowed feature then they should follow the standard precautions of requiring a valid email address and CAPTCHA. The anonymous comment form should also provide a means (and reminder) for registered users to login.

Ratings

In addition to comments, ratings provide a more quantifiable means by which to collect should user feedback about maps and layers that can be used either to compare the reputation of different layers or to refine and sort search results.

Each user should only be allowed to contribute one rating towards the average and subsequent ratings should remove prior ones. Anonymous users should not be able to rate at all.