Comment administration leaves a lot to be desired as it currently stands in Backdrop.

I'm in the process of manually migrating blog posts from an old site to a new Backdrop site. Some of the blog posts have comments that I want to copy over too.

When I'm logged in as User 1 and am creating content, I can specify a custom Authored By user and Authored On date/time. When I'm adding a comment however, it defaults to my user and the current date/time with no way to change it initially. I have to create the comment as me, then edit it before I have access to edit the user and date/time, etc.

Worse still, once a comment is created, I can only change the user to another user account on the site. I can't enter a custom name (like 'John Smith') like you can when you're initially adding a comment as an anonymous user. That means I have to copy over comments from the old site as an anonymous user (to enter a custom name and email address), then login to approve the comment where I can then edit the date/time, before I can finally create additional comments in reply to that one.

Surely there's an easier way? Why can't the full administration ability be enabled from the get-go for admin users? And how can we fix it so that admins can enter custom names and email addresses just like anonymous users can?

GitHub Issue #: 
2919