Weblog Tools Collection

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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.

I’ve been reading a very interesting discussion over on the IntenseDebate blog with regards to the question, Who Owns Your Comments? IntenseDebate is one of three major third party commenting systems available. The other two are Disqus and CoComment.

Before I dive into the WordPress aspect of this question, you need to know that IntenseDebate is asking this question because they are a third party commenting system. Therefor, they act as a link between the blog and the commenting system which is outside of the in-house solution provided by publishing platforms such as WordPress. Because of this fact, IntenseDebate needs to figure out how comment editing between the two will work out for the best.

However, the question IntenseDebate raised can be addressed to the realm of blogging in general. When you browse around WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress powered blogs and leave a comment, who really owns that comment? You or the blogger? Or should there be shared ownership between the two?

A number of interesting points were made in the comments of the ID post. For instance, some users didn’t care who owned their comments just as long as they couldn’t be changed by the blog author. Others believe that because of the way U.S. copyright law works, commenter’s retain the ownership and copyright of their comments. While still others believe that a Creative Commons commenting license is in order for Blog owners to display on their site.

Where do I fall on this issue? Bloggers have had the ability to edit comments for quite some time now. I believe that editing a comment to misconstrue the original comment is morally wrong. In fact, I believe the entire issue of what bloggers do with comments after they have been posted comes down to morality. In my own experience, I have only edited a few comments due to misspelling or the posting of personal information such as phone numbers or email addresses.

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.

That’s what I think. Let me know what you think in the COMMENTS!

Ajax Edit Comments, the Digg like comment editor written by Ronald Huereca has undergone a significant rewrite. For those that are familiar with the older versions, you’re going to be in for quite the surprise as Ronald has rewritten the plugin from the ground up. The new version contains an updated interface, numerous backend improvements and a redesigned configuration page.

One of the biggest changes I noticed with the new version is that you no longer can double click on the comment text to edit it inline. Instead, you click on an Edit link. After clicking the edit link, you’re presented with a screen similar to this one:

Another visual change are the buttons/links that appear underneath every comment. The buttons give you access to edit the comment, moderate the comment, mark the comment as spam or deleting the comment. That comment interface looks little like this:

In my opinion, this makes handling comments much more streamlined, especially when you can do most of the administration functions from the comment form itself, rather than the administration panel. Interestingly enough, this same panel of options appear within the administration panel in the Akismet area as well as the comment moderation area.

Probably the biggest change in regards to version 2 is the back end configuration page. Ronald has done an excellent job using the WordPress 2.5 admin styles to allow the options page to blend in smoothly with the back end redesign. This is where the bread and butter of the plugin is located. Here is a short list of things you can configure:

• Amount of comment editing time
• Spam Notification Text (Displayed when comment is detected as spam)
• Options for Anonymous Users
• Options for Registered Users
• Whether or not to display the editing countdown timer
• The ability to edit emails
• Your choice of spam protection from either Akismet, Defensio or None.
• Styles ( Specifically button styles and editor styles)
• Character Encoding
• Individual Options that only affect you
• Ajax Edit Comments Cleanup (This will delete the security keys associated with the comments)

So far, I’ve upgraded Ajax Edit Comments on my personal site and the plugin has been working flawlessly so far. I actually prefer this version over the other, primarily because of the interface changes. Ronald has done an excellent job with the new version and I recommend everyone download and give this plugin a try. In my opinion, it is very frustrating to comment on someone’s WordPress powered site and discover that there is no way to edit your own comments. I believe that editing your own comments should be one of those features that should be added to the core of WordPress. But until that happens (if it does) this plugin makes an excellent addition to your blog.

As a side note, Ronald has told me that he coded the plugin in such a way that it would be pretty easy to implement it into the core.

When I recently wrote a post which pointed to an article that described a few things you should do with your WordPress blog immediately after having it installed, I noticed Collin made a comment in that, WordPress was like the Windows OS where as, it comes bundled with Internet Explorer for a browser while WordPress comes bundled with (albeit fantastic) Akismet for a comment spam blocker.

With that in mind, here are 9 plugins that you can use either as stand alone replacements or in various combinations to combat comment spam. Not all plugins work nicely with others so be sure to read the installation manual if you decide to use any of these plugins on your own blog.

1. Comments For Cookies - This plugin adds a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam.

2. Bad Behavior - Bad Behavior is an awesome comment spam blocking plugin. If you can imagine, Bad Behavior is like Akismet on steroids. BH is a plugin which contains a series of scripts which block comment spam, trackback spam, guestbook spam, wiki spam, and even protects your site from some malicious website hacking. It’s been rumored that Akismet combined with Bad Behavior is the ultimate anti spam configuration in WordPress.

3. WP-SpamFree - SpamFree takes a somewhat different approach at combating spam by using a combination of JavaScript and cookies. According to the plugin author, most automated bots are stopped dead in their tracks by using this method while normal web site visitors are unaffected. However, the plugin author does state that there may be a few visitors who have JS and cookies disabled who might be annoyed by this plugin but that those people would be far fewer than the 100% of people which would be annoyed by CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions and other validation methods.

4. Spam Karma 2 - SK2 is the successor to SpamKarma. SpamKarma2 developed in 2007 is a an anti spam plugin which contains a wide assortment of options with the ability to find tune it’s effectiveness. SK2 even comes with it’s own module system where you can download separate modules and add functionality to the original plugin if the default is not enough for you. Despite this plugins age, WordPressers are still chanting about how well this plugin works.

5. Comment Inbox - Developed by Mark Jaquith, Comment Inbox gives you the ease of the moderation queue with the freedom of unmoderated comments. Comment Inbox works by placing all comments except caught spam into moderation which is renamed to Comment Inbox. All comments in the Comment Inbox will show up immediately on your blog so conversations don’t become interrupted by moderation time lines. An effective way of dealing with both spam and bacn on your blog.

6. CAPTCHA-Godfather - This plugin offers four different methods of protectio. The first is a verification code which is always generated dynamically. The second is that each verification code is given a session id which is different from the PHPSESSID value. The third protection is that every session id and verification code gets their own time stamp. The time stamp works on the premise that humans need a few seconds or minutes to post a comment. The last protection involved IP addresses. The visitor’s IP is stored with the verification code and only when the comment contains the original IP it’s then saved and held for moderation.

7. Defensio Anti-Spam - This plugin is used by a number of WordPress bloggers. It works similarly in the same way as Akismet as it is an advanced, spam filtering service that learns and adapts to your behaviors and those of your readers. Defensio also includes support for OpenID, detailed statistics and more. With all of this functionality under the hood, it’s no wonder that this is one of the most popular anti spam plugins in use today, outside of Akismet.

8. Worst Offenders - Worst Offenders is a plugin that you can use to help decrease the amount of time you spend looking through messages to determine if they are spam or not. Worst Offenders analyzies messages already marked as spam and then uses several techniques to identify messages with common sources, subjects, and content. The messages marked as Worst Offenders can then be deleted all at once, leaving only a handful of messages to sift through.

9. WP Captcha-Free - WP Captcha-Free blocks automated comment spam without resorting to CAPTCHAs. It does so by validating a hash based on time (and some other parameters) using AJAX when the form is posted. Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected. Unlike using a captcha, this does not place any burden on the commenter.

10. Akismet - There is no way in which I am going to write about spam blocking plugins and not include Akismet. Current versions of WordPress come with Akismet installed by default. Akismet uses a unique algorithm combined with a community-created database to “learn” which comments are comment spam and which are legitimate.

The default configuration for Akismet may not be enough for some. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that by check marking the configuration option to allow Akismet to automatically discard spam comments on posts that are older than a month has dramatically lowered the amount of spam in my moderation queue.

As for myself, I am perfectly content with the performance I have received out of Akismet. However, I must note that some of the success tied into Akismet deals with the way I have configured commenting in general on my own personal blog. For example, for a comment to appear on my blog, a user must fill out the name and email text fields. They must also contain a previously approved comment. I have also configured my comment moderation settings to place comments in the moderation queue if they contain two or more links.

Everyone’s comment spam/configuration circumstances are different, so be sure to experiment with different options or techniques to figure out which comment spam blocking recipe works for you. If you would like even more information on how to combat comment spam, check out this article on the Codex.