I've decided to use Drupal for a totally minimalistic website, which I'm sure I would be able to put together from scratch in just a few days. Anyway, I take it as a good exercise in altering and theming even the tiniest elements of a Drupal system.

I ran into a couple of problems while working on the website, but I spent most time on trying to remove the default value from the comment form Name input box. For such a small modification, a few hour struggle has been long enough to trigger a blog post.

The website itself consists from only three pages:

1. a home page with an image on it,
2. a stupid simple photo gallery, for which the Slideshow module was a perfect fit, and
3. a guestbook -- an empty Story node with comments enabled.

I've been trying to keep it small even theming wise, so I use Zen's STARTERKIT sub-module. Everything was good and fine until I decided to rename Comments to Messages and only require visitor's name and message body to be entered.

I just didn't seem to be able to remove the Anonymous string from the Name input box. I tried a theming function, I tried hook_form_alter() and hook_form_comment_form_alter(), too. I quickly resorted to Google, which only came up with exactly same solutions as I had tried:

function custom_changes_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
  if ($form_id != 'comment_form')
    return;
 
  unset($form['comment_filter']['format']);
  unset($form['mail']);
  unset($form['homepage']);
  unset($form['captcha']['#description']);
  unset($form['preview']);
 
  $form['comment_filter']['comment']['#rows'] = 5;
 
  $form['name']['#default_value'] = '';
  $form['name']['#required'] = TRUE;
}

It just didn't seem to work. I went through my code multiple times, I went through the Comment module code and didn't see where the value could be reset after I had cleared it.

Only when I switched off Javascript I realized a once submitted value gets stored in cookie and restored via script. Therefore, most of the solutions out there are correct, and if they don't seem to be working for you, make sure to remove the comment_info_name cookie.