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Not too long ago, I published a post which dove into the controversial subject of comment ownership and I must say, you guys and gals came up with quite a bit of discussion points. In that post, here is how I described my position on the matter:

I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

For those of you that agree, I’d like to draw your attention to Alex King’s Comment License WordPress plugin. This plugin makes it as easy as 1 2 3 to add a commenting policy to your blog.

After downloading, uploading, then activating the plugin, browse to ADMIN-SETTINGS-COMMENT LICENSE. You should see something similar to this:

Click anywhere inside of the text field and then create your own comment license. Once you click on the UPDATE COMMENT LICENSE button, the text will be saved and displayed just above your commenting form on your blog.

If you notice that the license is not being displayed on your theme, it may be because your comments.php template is missing ‘comment_form‘. In order to add this functionality, read the readme.txt file included with the plugin download package as that contains the line of code that will need to be placed within your comments.php template file.