How to Supercharge Your Comment Stream

As a follow up to my earlier post on social comment systems, there are existing plugins to supercharge your comment stream for those of you who are happy enough with the way things work in WordPress already, particularly if you have upgraded to the latest and greatest edition. The following short post takes a look at some of the best plugins out there that can drive interaction, without going the whole hog and implementing a new comment system.

Tweetbacks Plugin

URL: http://yoast.com/wordpress/tweetbacks/

As Twitter provides an additional avenue for conversation, when someone mentions your URL, there is a chance that you will miss out on the content that is taking place in the Twitter Stream. Tweetbacks allows you to reclaim that conversation, by pulling in all mentions of the current post URL beneath your comments in a neat and tidy way. A great little plugin to tap into the real-time web.

Twitterlink Comments

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitterlink-comments/

This handy little plugin allows your visitors to add an extra field to your comment form so a user can add their Twitter username. A user configured ‘follow me’ link is then displayed along with their details on all their comments, providing an easy way for other visitors on your site to find out more about them, and provide incentive for them to comment.

Threaded Comments

URL: http://www.from-the-couch.com/post.cfm/title/how-to-style-wordpress-threaded-comments

In the latest version of WordPress this is provided out of the box, however you do have to implement some styles and some code in your comments.php to get it to work on particular themes. This video tutorial from the guys at Obox show you exactly how to do this.

Threaded Comment Numbering

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gregs-threaded-comment-numbering/

WordPress 2.7 introduced a great new feature – comment threading. This allows you to have sub conversations within the comments, with particular users on your site. This plugin allows you to easily ‘number’ the conversations regardless of whether they are sub conversations or not. Essentially it is a cosmetic plugin.

Quoter

URL: http://www.damagedgoods.it/wp-plugins/quoter/

Quotes are a standard feature in forums, and easily allow users to reference other people’s statements to address them. With this plugin, comments can be quoted by clicking a link which pastes them (real-time with Javascript, or, if it is disabled, refreshing the page) in the comment form. Once the comment is submitted, the quoted part is pulled out via CSS styling.

Whisper Comment

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/whisper-comment-afm/

Whisper comment allows your visitors to quietly target a comment at a particular user, if others see the comment, it will only be the replacement text. This allows off-list conversation to occur directly within your blog, almost like a private message system.

Ajax Comments

URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-comments/

This plugin mimics some of the features provided by the likes of Disqus, and improves the user experience provided by your comment stream. Both comments and form posting are handled with javascript and when moderation is turned off, your comment stream seems much more real-time, with freshly posted content polled regularly by the script. It degrades gracefully for unsupported or browsers with js turned off and provides a great way to improve the overall experience on your site.

A previous post in a similar vein also mentions two other plugins which can boost interaction on your blog, namely CommentLuv and Subscribe to Comments. Both are relevant to the comment stream, particularly the latter which encourages commenter’s to return to a conversation and respond directly when someone else replies.

What do you use to give your comments more juice? Let me know in the comments.

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Filed in: Blogging
Tagged with: comments • social • stream • wordpress