FV Thoughtful Comments adds front end comment moderation including sophisticated banning mechanisms. Say Goodbye to Disqus!
We’ve always found the comment moderation/management a bit weak (no wonder so many people are using the Disqus crutch). Our plugin Thoughtful Comments supercharges comment moderation by moving it into the front end (i.e. in context). It also allows banning by IP, email address or domain.
Unlike many comment plugins, Thoughtful Comments works hand in hand with Akismet, feeding all the information into Akismet as well as the existing WordPress whitelist and blacklist features.
What’s cool about Thoughtful Comments is that you can add it to a WordPress site with no changes to existing comment moderation tables and you can remove it from a WordPress site with no loss of core functionality. I.e. I think Thoughtful Comments could be integrated into core with a minimum amount of pain. Thoughtful Comments works with all current Subscribe to Comment plugins as well. As we use all core functions and tables, Thoughtful Comments works with all current Subscribe to Comment plugins as well.
Thoughtful Comments is the most powerful and useful code we’ve ever written (we have four very popular plugins). It’s integration into core would save many, many site owners the pain of Disqus.
Thoughtful Comments is entirely stable and active on some of the most heavily commented political and lifestyle sites in the world.
While Automattic has a horse in the ring (Intense Debate), we’d really like to see Thoughtful Comments included in core.
Support | Change Log | Installation | Usage
If you want to get the most correct display when deleting a comment and preserving it’s replies, you need to use a theme which is using “cascade” display of the comments instead of “nested” display.
Thoughtful Comments assumes that each comment is contained in some HTML element with unique ID which is containing the comment ID, so it works with most of the themes.
Also, commenter name should not be in cite tag, so that the HTML highlight will appear properly and not as readable HTML (similar to code tag).
Just copy the plugin directory into your WordPress plugins directory (usually wp-content/plugins) and activate it in WordPress admin panel.
You can modify the CSS file in the plugin (/wp-content/plugins/thoughtful-comments/css/frontend.css) to change the styling of plugin action links and the highlights.
The front end comment moderation which editor and admin users are able to see and use.
Number of unapproved comments shown for editor and admin users in the frontend. The number is highlighted as there are some unapproved comments and there's a tooltip.
Per-user moderation settings.
Admin screen settings.