When You Need WordPress Comments to Really, Completely, Totally Stop

by Patty J. Ayers May 28^th, 2013 2 Responses

WordPress comments make me think of Rasputin, the 19th century Russian mystic.

The story goes that when his enemies wanted to kill Rasputin, they stabbed him, but he survived it. So they poisoned him with a large amount of cyanide – and he survived that too. Shooting him in the back with a revolver slowed him down temporarily, but then suddenly he rose up and lunged at his attackers. They shot him again, and then clubbed him repeatedly, and somehow he still lived. Throwing him into an icy river finally put an end to poor Rasputin.

Tutorials

How To Remove The URL Field From WordPress Comments

by Sarah Gooding March 26^th, 2013 6 Responses

cut — Cut the URL field out of the WordPress comment form

There are some WordPress sites where you may not want to include the URL field in the comment form. It’s not always necessary and spammers tend to use it to link to their spammy websites, which will be posted in your comments if you have auto approval turned on. Just to be safe, you may want to remove that URL field altogether.

Miscellaneous

WordPress Comments: Picking the Right System for You

by Tom Ewer November 30^th, 2012 5 Responses

In a way, comments define blogging and the whole web 2.0 “movement”. From a personal perspective they represented my first victories in blogging. As a beginner blogger, each new comment I received was like a little thumbs up for my amateurish efforts.

So it’s fair to say that I have a soft spot for comments — although my blog tends to get quite a few these days, I still appreciate the input of my readers as much as I ever did and reply to the vast majority of them.

Miscellaneous

Beginner WordPress Bloggers: 10 Things You Shouldn’t Do

by Tom Ewer November 9^th, 2012 3 Responses

There are plenty of posts out there with tips for WordPress newbies, which is pretty damned handy, it has to be said.

After all, we were all beginners once. When you first fire it up, WordPress can be pretty overwhelming — such a depth of functionality is not easily presented in an immediately intuitive manner. Having said that, it only takes a few nudges in the right direction to get on your way. Install a theme here, a plugin there, have a fiddle with the visual editor, and you’re on your way.

Opinion

Should You Have Comments On Your Site?

by Thord Daniel Hedengren November 1^st, 2012 3 Responses

I’ve been fired due to not writing enough keywords in my columns. I’ve got three columns left on my contract, this being one of them.

Let’s leave the shenanigans for a while and talk shop. Or comments, let’s talk comments.

Do you like comments? On your site, your blog, your every bloody thing you publish online?

I don’t. People keep being bad to me, and I end up crying in a corner. I’m a very sensitive person, you know, and people need to be nicer.

Opinion

The Lovely Blockquote

by Thord Daniel Hedengren October 11^th, 2012 Leave a comment

I’ve been meaning to write this column for a while, which is to say I just thought of it and it interested me a lot more than the one I had planned. Sometimes that’s the same thing, or at least I can claim it is since this is my bloody column (insert still a column link and so on) and not even The Farmer can stop me from hitting that Publish button. I guess he could unpublish stuff though, but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, shall we?

Community, Plugins

A WordPress Comments Plugin That Creates Conversations

by Matthew Tschoegl September 20^th, 2012 8 Responses

When trying to draw visitors to a blog or website, the best advice you can can get is to spend your time making sure that your content is great: finding interesting and unique topics, researching them thoroughly, writing out your ideas intelligently and clearly, and then editing them carefully.

News, Plugins

Monetize Your Blog Comments with Disqus Promoted Discovery

by Craig Grella August 31^st, 2012 11 Responses

There are myriad ways to monetize your blog – from e-commerce themes to contextual advertising, and everything in between. But recently, the group at Disqus, the popular blog commenting plugin for WordPress, have thought up a new way to bring in revenue – your comments!
Disqus Discovery Box
The Disqus Discovery Box is a relatively new feature from the commenting platform which shows your viewers relevant content on you blog. The box shows up at the bottom of your discussion thread area, inside the Disqus Community Tab, and points your readers to other articles and comments they might be interested in reading.

Plugins

Enable Images in WordPress Comments

by Sarah Gooding August 16^th, 2012 6 Responses

Sometimes you can’t trust users with the ability to leave media in comments, especially on a site where commenting is open to all. If your users are considerate and trustworthy, adding images to comments opens up an opportunity for more discussion. Comment Images is a new plugin that makes it easy for users to upload an image while leaving a comment.

Here’s how your comment form will look when you have this comment form plugin installed:

Images in comments are formatted nicely to fit in the space:

Comment Images features:

Notifies the administrator if the plugin is not compatible with their hosting environment

Plugins

Spam Destroyer Really Works To Kill WordPress Spam

by Sarah Gooding August 10^th, 2012 3 Responses

WordPress comment spam is a never-ending problem, and this keeps me constantly on the hunt for the best spam killing plugin. CAPTCHA’s can sometimes work but we all hate them with the fire of a thousand suns. Even the fancy ones with images and game are just lame and inconvenient.