Comment is a good communication tool between blog authors and visitors. Here is the list of 12 most popular WordPress comment plugins.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Akismet Plugin Homepage
Download Akismet
What we like: You no need to configure anything except API key to make the plugin working.
What we dislike: You need to enter API key to activate the plugin. It could include more feature such as CAPTCHA to fight with spammy comments.
Subscribe to Comments
Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!
Subscribe to Comments Plugin Homepage
Download Subscribe to Comments
What we like: You can now offer visitors the option of subscribing to comments on an entry without having to leave a comment themselves. And subscribers are able to change their subscription email.
What we dislike: It should include a checkbox in the comment section for commenters to unsubscribe instead of going through subscription manager. And it should make the appearance of the subscription manager to include blog’s header and footer by default instead of waiting blog owner to make the change.
WP-SpamFree
It’s an extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtually eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam without CAPTCHA, challenge questions or other incovenience to site visitors. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog including a spam-free contact form feature as well.
WP-SpamFree Plugin Homepage
Download WP-SpamFree
What we like: It’s a very powerful anti-spam plugin compared to WordPress default, Akismet. It is compatible with all cache plugin.
What we dislike: Although it doesn’t need CAPTCHA to eliminate spammy comment, but I do hope it can provide CAPTCHA option for those who want to use it. It will be nice if it can integrate anti-spam feature with other contact form plugin.
Live Comment Preview
This plugin uses only client-side Javascript to format a preview, it does not make any Ajax requests to the server. This provides a smooth live preview as you type.
What we like: Visitors can preview comment and it could reduce some human error.
What we dislike: That will be better if the plugin author could improve the user interface and make it more stylish. And visitors can preview comment after clicking submit button will make it more perfect.
Get Recent Comments
This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the HTML layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the corresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.
Get Recent Comments Plugin Homepage
Download Get Recent Comments
What we like: You have the control what to show for those latest comments and it can filter out unwanted pingbacks which is supposed not to be a comment.
What we dislike: Hope it can be improved to show recent comments in the footer.
WP Ajax Edit Comments
WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.
WP Ajax Edit Comments Plugin Homepage
Download WP Ajax Edit Comments
What we like: It provide another option for administrator to edit or approve a comment without going through admin screen. In addition, I appreciate it has the feature which allows visitors to edit their own comment.
What we dislike: It will be good if it can support more anti-spam plugin such as WP-SpamFree.
Keyword Luv
In order for your blog comments to work to your full advantage in terms of search engine ranking gains, the anchor text associated with the link to your website should be keywords you want to rank for. We can thank spammers for creating the no-follow fiasco—and the fact is, many blog owners will spam a comment which uses keywords as the name of the person leaving the comment. The Keyword Luv plugin will help fellow commentators by allowing them to place both their name and keyword anchor text on the link—ensuring a fight against spam while saying thanks for commenting. To use the plugin effectively, your blog should also have the nofollow code removed in order for this plugin to function correctly.
Keyword Luv Plugin Homepage
Download Keyword Luv
What we like: Very good idea, I like this plugin.
What we dislike: You need to use a plugin to remove nofollow link in the comment which is a little inconvenient for you.
CommentLuv
Help out fellow commenters by using this plugin to fetch the most recent blog post from their blog. It will display at the bottom of their comment, and encourage participation in comment campaigns as it will help earn traffic all around. As with its aforementioned counterpart, CommentLuv works with dofollow blogs.
CommentLuv Plugin Homepage
Download CommentLuv
What we like: By displaying your latest blog post in the other blog’s comment section will help to increase the exposure of your blog and ultimately bring some traffic to your blog.
What we dislike: Since it retrieves latest blog post from commenter, it will good to have more options to enable other information such as comment count, date of last post and etc along with blog post title.
My Comments Elsewhere
This plugin collects the comments you posted on other people’s websites and lets you display them on your own blog. The process is entirely automated and works across all websites.
My Comments Elsewhere Plugin Homepage
Download My Comments Elsewhere
What we like: Great plugin and you can display those comments in sidebar or in a page.
What we dislike: It should have the ability for people to remove some comments to be displayed if they doesn’t fit into the theme of the blog.
@ Reply
This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.
@ Reply Plugin Homepage
Download @ Reply
What we like: Simple plugin doing what it claims.
What we dislike: If possible, it can expand feature list to include other social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and etc.
NoFollow Free
This WordPress plugin remove the nofollow attribute from your WordPress comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FREE” to encourage your users to submit comments.
NoFollow Free Plugin Homepage
Download NoFollow Free
What we like: It has a few options when to remove nofollow attribute in the link to give the link juice to commenters, e.g. remove the nofollow attribute only if visitor posts at least X comments.
What we dislike: Nothing at this moment.
WP-reCAPTCHA
Integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection. reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuosly typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach.
WP-reCAPTCHA Plugin Homepage
Download WP-reCAPTCHA
What we like: It is a good way too block spam comment from non-human.
What we dislike: If it is used together with Akismet or WP-SpamFree, then it will make the spam blocking more effective.
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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
KeywordLuv is a pretty neat plugin.
stimulating and informative, but would be suffering with something more on this topic?
@DobMoornoro,
May I know why suffering?
WordPress has some great plugins but none are as efficient as Keyword Luv. I’ve been using it and loving it.
@Irene,
Different plugin has different functionality and usage. Sometime it might be hard to compare different plugin which has different nature. But I agree that Keyword Luv is a great plugin.
I have been using comment luv and it has improved the number of commnets on my blog.
Great write up on Plugins. I agree CommentLuv is a great plugin. It promotes conversation on your site and gives the commenter some SEO value for their site.
Hmmn, A Nice list of must-have plugins. Here is my fear.What are the consequences of installing a large number of WP plugins
Thanks for this post I never knew there were so many different comments plugin to help improve and increase the number of comments.
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i cant reduce my post in thesis theme…i’v tried everything and blog keeps showing full post content..how do i reduce to summarize form and put a read more button?????
I admire commentluv plugin and use it on my main website.. Atleast it gives a reason to users to add comment …
Though new Google announcement of following nofollow links making me to remove it.. What do you suggest??
I go through all the comments and see which ones deserve to be there and which ones don’t. I must say that after installing it
my comments have increased and interaction with some commentators have also increased.
I can see your getting the odd spam comment because your using keywordluv. I feel your pain mate…using Bad Behavior and Akismet at least kills off the obvious spammers :p
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Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so, Excellent post!
I’m Out!
I’m glad to hear that Akismet works to stop some of the spammy comments. This is the first I’ve heard of the “Bad Behavior” plugin. Thanks for the info.
nice post. I would love to follow you on twitter. By the way, did any one know that some chinese hacker had busted twitter yesterday again.
@Kimberlycgs,
Thank you for your comment. I didn’t know that Twitter was hacked yesterday.
I fully support the idea of making your blog a nofollow free site and encouraging others to leave comments on your site
@P Hemmant,
I disagree. You will lose a lot of link juices if they are hundreds or thousands of links in your comments. And eventually it will hurt your Page Rank.