I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention - Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options - Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments - Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?

One thing I am really excited about is that Gravatars are really starting to gain popularity now that Automattic has purchased and is supporting them.  And now that support is built right into WordPress, it opens up a lot of options for WordPress users.

The most common place you’ll find a Gravatar is usually with an individual comment to help comments stand out.  Another place you will sometimes see them is in the sidebar, like we have it setup here at Hack WordPress.   One thing, however, that people are slowly coming around to is using Gravatars with blog posts to identify the author of the post.    This is something that is a great idea for a multi-author blog and something I’ve considered doing on this website.

So, how would you go about setting up Gravatars to display with each individual post?   Over at ThemeShaper, Ian Stewart recently shared an easy way to do this.   You just need the following code:

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '64' ); ?>

When used, WordPress will match up the e-mail address associated with the post author to determine what Gravatar to use.   The 64 is the size (pixels) of the Gravatar.

Great find Ian!

By default, a typical WordPress blog will display the very first comment at the top of the comments template. While I prefer this way, many others do not. If you are someone that would like your WordPress blog to display the most recent comment on top, Moses of WPThemesPlugin.com explains how to display recent comments on top.

Unlike most of the WordPress hacks we’ve covered here at Hack WordPress, this one is not something that can be controlled from within the WordPress theme. You’ll have to actually go into the comment-template.php file (in the wp-includes folder) in order to make this adjustment. The good news is that it is REALLY easy. Click over to get step-by-step instructions on how to complete this hack. Great work Moses!

A lot of times I run across some great posts talking about WordPress, but they don’t always warrant a featured post. Here are a few WordPress related posts I’ve recently enjoyed and hope you will also:

• One Mans Blog explains How to Increase the Number of Comments in the WordPress Editor. This can also easily be covered with a WordPress Greasemonkey Script.
• Michael of WPCandy gives you ideas on where to find WordPress help. In addition to Google search and blogs like this one, there are a lot of great sources out there for WordPress help. People often forget about the WordPress Codex, which I will often reference when writing my posts. There are also some great forums dedicated to WordPress (ours will be up by this weekend hopefully).
• Weblog Tools Collection has taken our post explaining how to separate trackbacks and comments and expanded on it in their post explaining how to manage trackbacks and pingbacks in your WordPress theme.   While it isn’t quite as simple as our instructions, it will give you much more control over how they function and even provides a way to remove trackbacks and pingbacks completely from displaying on your WordPress blog.

Do you have a Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar)? As a loyal fan of the WordPress software that runs each of my weblogs, I feel that it is important to support WordPress in any way that I can. Because this blog focuses on WordPress, that is especially true here.

You may remember that last October Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Gravatar. In the time since then, they have revamped the infrastructure of Gravatar to drastically speed things up, integrated it into the WordPress.com platform, and then updated the Gravatar WordPress plugin to function better with self-hosted WordPress blogs.

If you don’t already have a Gravatar, I recommend you first sign up with Gravatar for a free account using whatever e-mail address you normally use to leave comments. Once confirmed, it will then prompt you to upload the avatar you want to use. You’ll need to use the e-mail address used for your Gravatar in the e-mail address field of the comment form (all in lower case) when leaving a comment for the Gravatar to display properly next to each comment.

Now that Automattic is backing it, and WordPress.com blogs have integrated them, I think that over time Gravatar will continue to grow and the service will continue to get better. It is with that belief that I decided to add individual Gravatars to the comments on this blog (I also revamped the comments section to better support it). I would also like to see other self-hosted WordPress blogs begin to support Gravatars as well (many currently either support MyBlogLog avatars, or no avatars at all), so what I decided to do is update this post with an outbound link to your blog if your blog supports Gravatars.

Here is what you need to do to get an inbound link to your homepage:

1. Update your blog to display the commentators Gravatar with their comment. This can easily be done by installing one of the many Gravatar plugins (including the official Gravatar WordPress plugin) and then calling the plugin somewhere in your comments.php file. Depending on the theme, it will usually go in the commentblock section. If your blog already supports Gravatars, skip to step 2!
2. Leave a comment below with a link to your blog.

It is really that easy! I will then confirm your blog displays Gravatars with the comments and update this post with a link to your blog’s homepage, giving you a quality inbound link and hopefully some additional traffic. I’d like to turn this post into a showcase of WordPress.org blogs that support Gravatar! [Continue Reading...]

Depending on how you have your WordPress blog set up, you more than likely are receiving a flood of comment moderation notices in your e-mail inbox from incoming comments and trackbacks/pingbacks. This is not a bad thing, but can often become tedious as your comments continue to increase.

The How-To Geek has created a solution to this problem by creating a WordPress Comments Moderation Notifier.  Once you’ve downloaded the software and installed it, it will place an icon in your Window’s system tray.  You will then want to add your site’s URL and login information in the settings, then determine how often you want it to check for moderation.  This also requires you to upload and activate a WordPress plugin.

This application then uses the WordPress API to check for comments awaiting moderation and then will display a pop up box once there are comments that need moderating.  You can click on the icon to access your WordPress comments moderation queue.

You can also easily access your WordPress moderation queue at your convenience by using the icon in your system tray.

If you decide to go through with this application, I recommend you place a shortcut to the notifier in your Windows startup folder so that it will be opened every time you restart your computer.

One feature I would like to see is the ability to monitor multiple WordPress blogs for comment moderation.   A high percentage of WordPress users now seem to run more than one blog at a time, so this application won’t offer much value to those bloggers.  Otherwise, I find this application very impressive and useful for people running a single blog.