A Place For Stephen

User Comments Plug-Ins

Remember to set WordPress up so that ALL comments submitted need to be moderated BEFORE they are published… Apart from keeping you clued in on what’s happening at your site, this process reminds you to respond as needed, but more importantly, keeps SP@M out of your blog.

And that’s the first plugin needed – one that identifies possible SP@M posts and warns you of them… and makes it easy to kill ‘em!

Akismet

Akismet (comes installed with WordPress 2.2+) checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

You need a FREE WordPress.com API key to use it, so get that before you activate the plugin. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Subscribe To Comments

Another comments plugin I like is Subscribe To Comments which allows readers to receive notifications of new comments as they are posted to an entry.

Upload the subscribe-to-comments.php file to your WP plugins directory. Once activated, go to OPTIONS and select SUBSCRIBE TO COMMENTS, and add your name and email address to the setup. You’ll also need to customise the messages that appear next to the checkbox, so enter a message like “Notify me of followup comments by e-mail” next to Not Subscribed… Then, click UPDATE OPTIONS.

Check AFTER the comment box at the bottom of this post to see what it looks like.

Once subscribed, people will receive an email with details of any new posts. They also get a link to MANAGE their subscriptions themselves, and you can access the SAME information they see by going into MANAGE/SUBSCRIPTIONS.

Popularity Contest

If you’re interested in how popular your posts are (compared to each other) then Popularity Contest will enable ranking of your posts by popularity. It uses visitor behavior to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated.

Just upload all of the unzipped popularity-contest folder to your plugins folder and activate the plugin. The default settings under OPTIONS/POPULARITY don’t need to be changed, and with the default WordPress template, the popularity rating appears automatically after the post (on this page) or after the excerpt (on the home page).

However, if you use another template, you may need to go to OPTIONS/POPULARITY to find the CODE to use… for example, you may need to edit the main index template (PRESENTATION/THEME EDITOR) and then decide where to put the code
<?php akpc_the_popularity(); ?>

Other Comments Plug-Ins

There are plenty of other comments plug-ins available that do all sorts of things… and I’ll play with a few more of them later and let you know how it goes.

But next – What’s this about tags? What are they??? Click on the next page below…

Popularity: 16% [?]

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