Top Commentators 2.0 WordPress Plugin – Do it right!
Top Commentators 2.0 WordPress Comments Plugin
General – The Top Commentators Plugin by Nate Sanden has proven to encourage visitor interaction with websites, however, it has been steadily abused by spammers and frowned upon by the Google nofollow movement. Thus a more SEO friendly version is in order, you can download it here.
Download: Top Commentators 2.0 – WordPress Comments Plugin
Installation: Extract and upload file to your plugins folder, enable it via your plugins page, instal it like a regular widget.
Benefits: This version of Top Commentators plugin, aptly named Top Commentators 2.0, retains all of the gooey goodness provided by nates original plugin and incorporates the widget readiness introduced by Krizka.net and it takes matters one step further to tackle the issues of spam and Google “dofollow vs nofollow” hate.
The changes to the original plugin are minimal with the major benefit being that nofollow IS applied to all pages EXCEPT the index page. Imagine leaving a comment on a site with 10,000 pages and becoming a top commentator – you get an instant 10,000 backlinks. Is that a good thing? The short answer is no, not for you OR the site owner, it’s more likely to appear that you just paid for links than anything else. I don’t want to argue the matter here in this post, please refer to one of hundreds of posts on the subject of sitewide backlinks over at Webmaster World if you’re curious. A front page link is a solid, and perhaps more appropriate, reward imo. This version gives you that choice.
Options: There are 9 options you can modify with the plugin – the default number of top commentators has been reduced from 10 to 5 in this version.
- reset (’hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’, ‘#’, ‘all’)
This tells the plugin how often it should reset the comment count. If you use the keyword ‘all’, it will never reset the comment counts.- limit (any positive integer (1 or more))
This will limit the maximum number of users you want shown.- filter_users (comma seperated list of usernames)
This will filter out common spam names such as ‘Make Money Online’.- filter_user_ids (comma seperated list of user id’s)
This will filter out any user_ids you don’t want shown, default is admin only.- filter_urls (comma seperated list of website URLs)
This will filter out any website URLs you don’t want shown.Note: The URI owner will not be removed entirely from the list. Just the link.
- none_text (text)
If no commentators are available a message is shown instead.- make_links (1 for yes 2 for no)
When visitors make comments, they are given the option of adding their website URL with their comment.
Setting make_links to 1 will make this visitors username into a link to the website URL they added to their latest comment.
Setting make_links to 2 will turn off this feature.
If a user never provided a link with their comment, their name will simply not be linked.- number_of_comments (y=yes, n=no)
If you want to only display the commentators name and not the number of comments he/she has made, set this to ‘n’.
- name_limit (any positive integer (1 – infinity))
Sometimes a commentator’s name is so long that it may wrap or even break your web page design. By limiting their name to a maximum number of characters you can avoid this problem. An ellipse is used if the commentators name is longer than the limit imposed.- start_html (html)
Allows you to wrap each commenters name/link in HTML of your choice.- end_html (html)
Allows you to wrap each commenters name/link in HTML of your choice.
Why not just nofollow everything?
Answer: Ahh the moral question – I’d have to say because encouraging visitor contributions is one of the responsibilities thrust upon all webmasters and contributions are valuable. As with anything moderation is key. I’m chosing to thank top commentators on my index page but not sitewide to sincerely say thank you. I think Google should adapt to that and not vice versa.
But what about the spammers and abusers?
Answer: The plugin gives me the tools needed to filter abuse. I’d also strongly recommend getting James McKay’s extremely versatile Comments Timeout plugin to work in tandem with this plugin to protect your content further. A spammer visiting your site for the first time won’t have access to ALL of your posts to get that number one spot, regular visitors will, if you use it properly. It protects older posts by locking them too, thus preventing someone from adding content and changing the dynamics/rankings of that page…
Demo: I’m using it on Popular Wealth now. (edit March 13th, 2008 – i’ve made all top commentator links nofollow on this site in order to set a solid baseline for an SEO study but the top commentators 2.0 download will still function as described – nofollow will be removed from your index page only, thus protecting your articles but still giving a solid front page link reward for active commenters on your site.)