confirm comment by email on Rails

Question

I'm creating a rails blog app. No visitor can sign up. The app will allow any visitor to post comment on a post. However, this comment will be persisted if and only the visitors clicks on a unique confirmation email that said visitor receives when subimming the comment for review. How could I do this? Is there a gem for that?

Answer 1

You could do it many ways, but providing a unique token would be a standard way to do it.

So the Comment model would have a column called confirmation_token which you could set to be random when the comment is created and a column called active which is false by default. Then you send a confirmation email with a link that has that token as a param:

http://www.mysite.com/comment/85/?confirm=<insert confirmation_token>

When that page is visited, you pick up the confirmation_token in your controller and set the active column to true if the token in the url matches the token in the database.

This is how many different types of confirmation are done, including most plain vanilla registrations (e.g. through Devise).