4 Enhancements to Improve Your Blog’s Comments Section
January 28, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
Comments are probably one of the most important methods to attain reader feedback and to improve the community aspect of your blog. By encouraging comments and utilizing them to their fullest potential, your blog can see tremendous growth and activity. So how do you optimize your blog’s comments section? Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve tweaked my comments file to allow for 4 enhanced features: 1: separation between comments and trackbacks, 2: threaded comments while keeping the same theme, 3: distinguished author comments using a different style, and 4: subscription to comments by email. In this article, I’ll describe the benefits of each change as well as how you can implement the improvements on your own blog.
Separate trackbacks from comments
Since trackbacks don’t usually add to the direct conversation of a particular post, I find it more efficient to separate them from comments altogether. That way you’ll easily be able to see how many links the post is getting as well as having a clean display of the conversation taking place. I don’t know of any Wordpress plugins that do this automatically but Daily Blog Tips offers a detailed set of step-by-step instructions on how to separate trackbacks from comments on your WordPress blog. I highly recommend you make this change.
Enable threaded comments on your blog
One of the major limitations in Wordpress is the inability to directly respond to a specific comment. By default, all comments are at the same level and it’s not possible to answer a question directly unless you use something like “@reader”. This is a clunky method that will oftentimes lead to replies never being seen. To combat this limitation, a Wordpress plugin called Brian’s Threaded Comments effectively changes the structure of the comments file to allow for nesting. Through the use of the plugin, conversations in comments flow much better. However, the plugin by default does not match your blog’s theme and I recommend you adapt it to fit your own custom design. If you’re not much of a coder, you can always hire someone to do it for you over at the Digital Point Forums. Anthony Tang helped me with mine for $40 and he did a great job.
Distinguish author comments with a different style
As the author and owner of your blog, you want to be sure that your voice is heard both in your posts and in your comments. However, when commenting on your own blog, your message will usually get lost in the sea of reader feedback. How do you distinguish your messages to make sure they stand out from the rest? I recently discovered a Wordpress plugin called Author Highlight that will allow you to set different style attributes for comments made by authors. I chose to use a subtle gray background for my comments but you might want to experiment with a bolder approach.
Subscribe to comments by email
With the huge amount of blogs readily available on the Internet, commentators will rarely remember to check back to a specific site to see if their comments have been replied to. How do you get them to come back for more? A Wordpress plugin called Subscribe to Comments allows readers to receive email messages every time a post that they’ve commented on is updated with a new message. This is definitely a must-have plugin.
The four enhancements mentioned above can do wonders for your blog’s commenting. It’ll be easier for your readers to communicate with you and they’ll thank you by being more active and by creating a bustling community. I recommend you try the changes out. What other improvements can be made to the comments section? I’d like to hear your thoughts so be sure to leave a comment here.
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Threaded Comments is almost a must for me for any blog. I haven’t spent time to customize mine fully though (separating pings and trackbacks seems to be quite a challenge). It really makes conversations more like… conversations XD
I haven’t tried Author Highlight.. Guess I’ll try it sometime once my blog/s reaches an active comment-base
I’m with you. I think threaded comments definitely adds to the conversation.
I was already using Brian’s Threaded Comments and I just installed Author Highlight. Just a note, but I had to modify the css inside of the threaded comments plugin to get my author highlight style to show up.
I didn’t have that problem on mine. It’s a pretty simple install and then you can use whatever CSS attributes you’d like.
Comments for a blog are a good thing and are one measure of how people are interacting with your blog.I also think writing good blog comments also encourages the blogger to continue writing blog entries. That’s why I allow blog comments in my blog also…
Hey Jack,
Comments definitely motivate me to continue blogging and to share my insights as an Internet marketer. Thanks and keep those comments coming.
I can’t seem to get the threaded comments to work on mine. Not sure what I’m doing wrong but hiring someone may be my last alternative!
Did you follow all of the instructions in the documentation? It’s just an upload to 2 files and activation in the backend. Be sure to overwrite your old comments.php file with the new one provided.
Hey Gyutae, thanks for the “subscribe to comments” plugin!
Hey Andrew,
That’s a definitely a must-use plugin. Let me know how it works out for you.
Great post Gyutae. I’ve been trying to find something like this for ages!
-Mike
Awesome. Thanks Mike. I’m glad I’ve ended your search.
Nice post. It is useful.
Thanks.
Having my comment stays unapproved for a longer period of time is annoying. Sometimes, when I felt that I have posted a comment but didn’t see the posted on the next sevaral days, I doubt to post it again. If my comment was not published because it is not acceptable, I am afraid I will cause uncomfortable feeling by reposting the same comment again…That’s just an opinion from a blog commenter.
I totally know what you mean. Most blog owners require that the first comment from a reader be approved before subsequent comments show up on the blog. This is to prevent spam so it’s a good compromise.
Thank you for responding Gyutae…Actually I know exactly the reason. It’s just sometimes to have my comments not published or deleted by the moderator is makes me questioning…Anyway, thank you for keep publish my comment although it is contradictory with most comments above.
Thanks for adding your views. Adding contradictory comments help to stir debate so I think it’s a good thing.
If a comment is not clearly spam or flaming … if it MIGHT have some value, I usually permit it even if it opposes my point of view.
I am willing to engage in open discussion … some of what I write IS controversial … but I am not willing to see my comments section disintegrate into an open brawl. Thus, the first comment from a new source is moderated. After that, you’re ‘in’ until you show some other ‘colors’.
That acknowledgment email is an important part of the process. For that reason, I recommend the “What would Seth Godwin Do?” plugin, which automates the initial email contact. Then, as a ‘real’ reason for dialog develops, you can get into one-on-one emails.
Reading a little further, I see that Mirjam posted regarding “CommentLuv” and ‘dofollow’. I use both of those also because I think that a commenter deserves their “pay”. Akismet does a great job of catching the ‘truly spam’ and that leaves me with valid, hand-written, comments. I am less concerned about “link juice” than I am about encouraging a lively community of discussion. Sadly, my most-commented post so far has been about my starting to do push-ups.
apart from the ones mentioned here, I really like adding the commentluv option, actually showing the last post from the commentator, giving them a little linklove back as a thank you for putting their effort into commenting and participating
I’ve seen the CommentLuv plugin being used on a lot of sites but I think it would detract from the conversation taking place. Plus it’d be easy to game and I wouldn’t want to lose control over what sites I was linking to. Great idea though.
I know what you mean, and it is certainly something to think about. However, I do check out the site that come up because of the commentluv when reading all the comments. I have recently installed a do-follow plugin to my blog aswell, which has the same effect aswell.
However, I feel that if somebody is commenting on my blog and taking the time to add something to the post, I don´t have a problem giving something back in return.
Maybe in time this point of view will change, but for now I really want to give it a try
have a nice weekend!
9OLepm hi nice site man thx http://peace.com
This is an example of the sort of comment that I would have spiked. “Hi nice site man thx” isn’t even a sentence and shows NO evidence of being based on your post about commenting tools.
Highlight author comment plugin seems to be a good idea. It’s on my waiting list!
I also use subscribe to comments by mail, but I uncheck the checkbox by default. My thought was not everyone want to follow the conversation, and it might drive them mad if they encounter their mailbox is clogged with new comment notifications since they didn’t remember subscribing.
I usually use coComment to keep me updated on conversations I joined. Check it thru my link if you’re curious
Wow – thanks for the great tips. I’ll be implementing some of these in about 10 seconds! Cheers.
How you think when the economic crisis will end? I wish to make statistics of independent opinions!
That is good extensive suggestion that of followed can improve blog comments. I also believe a good topic is necessary in order to grab the attentions of bloggers and commentators.
Anyways appreciated for sharing.
Thanks
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Very good ideas here… I think right away I’m going to do the threaded comments and the different coloured author comments.
Also (this is either because of your comment form or because my computer’s being weird) but when I typed in my name then pressed tab, the cursor didn’t go to the email section. This isn’t important or anything, just wanted to point it out