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.
Use it on my blog…great Plugin.
Interesting idea. thanks.
Ive had Alex’s plugin on my blog for a few months now, works a treat 😉
I installed King’s plugin the same day that you hosted the initial discussion on comments, and am quite pleased with it.
Useful plugin, thanks Jeff! Just wondering, but since I don’t quite understand legal terms, what does ‘reproduce in attribution’ mean?
@Flick It means that the blog author could reproduce your comment as long as he linked back to the author of the comment and gave attribution.
I will likely go home and install this on my personal blog… even though I only ever really publish jibberish anyway. It’s a good idea, and having read through the majority of the comments on the other post, I have my own opinions on the matter. Thanks for sharing!
@Jeff: Thank you! 🙂
I’ve been looking for something like this but still this is quite limited in space, perhaps linking to the full page will be necessary, especially for corporate blogs.
Usefull.
I will use it on all my blogs