WordPress Plugins to Pimp your Comment area
Comments on your blog is a way to show the freshness and constant activity on your blog. While you might think that the wordpress default comment box does the job, but it can’t hurt to pimp your comment area and give your user different options and reasons to post comment on your blog post.
After going through multiple comment plugins, i have collected a list of some comment plugins that you can use to pimp your comment area in wordpress.
Widgets that encourage participation on your blog
- Top Commentators
4null4 Top Commentator
Scott Riley’s Top/Recent Commentator Plugin
PFA’s Top Commentator Plugin
Removing nofollows from trackbacks and comments also increases participation
DoFollow – removes nofollow tags from the comments – Download
Do Follow Trackbacks – removes nofollow tags from the trackbacks. – Download
Now while you are allowing follow links it have one bad side to it. It increases spam, but on the good side the spam can be reduced and monitored.
Akismet Spam Stopper – created by the developers of WordPress, this usually comes installed in the default copy of wordpress and requires the API key which can be obtained for free from WordPress.
Dave’s Stop Karma – Another spam stopper for the comments.
Now lets hit the road for the look of the comment box
When you are the author of the blog you want others to notice you when you are replying to some comment or making a comment to your own post.
Sometimes these comment ruins the look of the entire template if some person decides to leave a really long url in the comment.
Turncate Long Urls in the comment by WP-Chunk
You can number the comments to show the users how many comments have been posted on the blog and which number will their comment be by the plugin Numbered Comments
Trackbacks sometimes look to ugly along with the rest of the comments, this plugin make them look nice. Nicer Trackbacks
Make your comment box into a full-featured text-editor by using TinyMCEComments
You can also allow your users to use smileys to make the comments look a little alive rather than dead text. – Custom Smilies
Enabling avatar to give users their own identity is a great way of encouraging users to comment.
Plugins to use:
Gravatar
MBLA – takes the icon from mybloglog and display it.
By allowing users to communicate with each other also encourages them to comment
Quoter – lets the commenter quote another person’s comment
Brian’s Threaded Comment – allows you to reply to comments, this is being used on many popular blogs including this one. I highly recommend this one.
Now after pimping the comment area you need your commenters to keep coming back, so make sure you add the option of subscribing to the comment
Adding each of these plugins will increase your chances of getting more comments on your blog. If you have anything to say feel free to comment on this post.
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
Good list of plugins for comment area..
Just installed the top commentators and nested comments plugin in my blog too
looking good chetan… i will be there to be in the list of the top commentators
I think Top Commentators and Brians Threaded Comments definitely help. Top Commentators acts as as incentive for readers to write comments.
[...] You both have the same targetted audience. For instance if you are targetting webmasters, and you come to my blog and see that I am targetting webmasters as well you can check out some of my posts. While you were checking the post and you read them feel free to comment. This goes with any type of niche with any type of blog. Just make sure your comment is thoughtful. You are trying to get some of your competitors audience to your website. You can advertise on their websites as well, but this is another useful way. This is killing two birds with one stone as you were going to analyze their blog and see what they were doing anyways, and all you are doing is taking that extra minute and writing some comments. I can guarantee you, if you do one comment on few blogs each day, and if the blog is provoding top commentators link all over. Imagine how many backlinks you can get. Hence why one of the main things that attract commentators is that top commentator plugin. [...]
nice work, brother
hey you don’t use avatars at all! Any particular reason for that?
the avatar increases the page load .. I don’t want anything that is not necessary. But some people like it
Yup when you start getting a lot of comments, these small things will matter a lot. Your overall design loads very fast. Congrats on that
Nice list of plugins, they really come in handy specially if you have 100s of comments coming every day.
Great plugins and an excellent pimp picture that you used up there, that was hilarious
Much the interesting has found here
this is needed plugins specially Akismet i use it as spam filter .
and Brian’s Threaded Comment is great too ” make your blog more active ” .
I am having great results with this plugin and run it on all my blogs..