Permission to Reply to Comments

Question

How to allow posting replies to comments to certain user roles only?
The goal is to allow users to post comments but not reply to them and have only certain roles able to post replies.

Initially I thought of hiding reply link for certain roles. But it is not a very bullet proof solution. Anyone knows of better methods?

Answer 1

Edit your comments.tpl.php file and delete the <?php print render($content['links']) ?>

Then all you gotta do is create your own reply, edit, and delete links

• reply is /comment/reply/[nid]/[cid]
• edit is /comment/[cid]/edit
• delete is /comment/[cid]/delete

So use PHP to load the nid and cid and replace the [tokens] with your PHP code.

Then use PHP if statement to check whether login (global) user is of role x, if true, you print the reply link.

For edit and delete links, you check if login (global) user uid is the same as comment author uid.

Answer 2

You could look at this module. It has more control on comments permission than what Drupal core does.

Another method is to add some code using hook_alter

MODULENAME_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
if ( $form_id == 'comment_form') {
  global $user;
  if(//certain role)
     unset(//comment reply form);
 }
};

Answer 3

For a more robust solution, create a RouteSubscriber to take over the comment.reply route and provide your own controller.

Your controller can extend CommentController from the comment module in core and either just replace the replyFormAccess function, or call the parent first and then build on it.