10 WordPress Tips & Tricks for Your Comment Page
May 5, 2009 by Joel Reyes · 16 Comments 
From a site owner and an avid bloggers perspective, if you create a blog and take the time to formulate useful content for your visitors to read, then you’d like them to share their insight and contribute to your collection of hard-pressed articles. Correct? Therefore, if by creating quality content this means that one will receive useful and valuable feedback, then why not bring creativity and uniqueness to that aspect of your blog?
One of the greatest rewards a blogger can receive is the feedback given by their readers; this is why leaving comments should be fun, easy, and entertaining. Below you will find 10 of the top creative WordPress tips and tricks for your comment page that will surely make your blogging life not only simpler, but fun for your readers.
1) Display the Total Amount of Comments on Your Blog
Popular blogs have a knack for proudly displaying the total number of subscribers and followers through twitter and feedburner, it’s a ritual. In addition to displaying the number of people that read your articles through feedburner, you can also showcase the entire number of comments ever published on your blog. All that’s required of you to do is place this simple code anywhere you’d like within your blog.
2) A Clear Row of Alternating Colors for Your Comments
Reading through comments can be somewhat daunting for the “faint at heart”, especially if the blog has numerous feedback posted. You can make it easier for your readers to scan through your comments by placing them in a row of alternating colors. This makes it a painless process to distinguish the difference between comments as the separations become clearer.
3) Giving Your WordPress Comments a Bit of Style
If you’re looking for something creative to do to your WordPress theme, then you can start by customizing your comment boxes. With this trick you can manage to steer away from the realm of mediocre commenting that sometimes draw your readers away instead of catching their eyes. Once you catch a commenter’s eyes through the use of graphics, you’ll grab their attention as well. The more attention you’re able to get a hold of, the more comments will start to trickle down your pages.
4) Seperate Your Comments from Trackbacks
When another blog links your post to theirs a comment in the form of a trackback will appear. If trackbacks are active within your blog you shouldn’t mix them with regular comments because readers can easily confuse them with comments posted by other visitors.
5) Styling Your Author Comments
This tip will help differentiate and make the authors comments stand-out from the rest. This allows readers to quickly identify an authors response without having to constantly search for them.
6) Numbering Your WordPress Comments
If your posts contain ample amount of comments, it can be beneficial to your readers and possibly yourself if you display a corresponding number next to it.
7) Disabling Commenting on Older Posts
It can also come of great use to disable commenting on older posts. This allows your comments to always be on the latest and up-to-date content on your site. In WordPress 2.7 this is a feature, however, in older versions you have to add a similar “hack” like this one.
8 ) Remove the Comment Section on Your Blog
By removing the comment section on your blog it may seem as though you’re compromising a vital part of your community, and you may be. However, there are times that as a blog author you wish to publish certain posts that will not leave a trail of responses behind it.
9) Use Twitter Graphics In Comments
There are those whose obsession with Twitter is a bit unhealthy. However, if you wish to diversify your comment page then you can integrate Twittastic graphics on your comments.
10) Ajax Edit Past Comments
Multiple commenting can become hectic, and as things may get hectic they may also get a little reckless. Ergo, a reader (or an author) can easily make a mistake when creating a comment. This nifty trick allows a reader to edit their comments within an alloted time, while blog owners can edit any comment at any time. This is only available for WordPress versions 2.5 and after.
You just shared some great tips, however, I can’t be on consensus with you regarding points 7. and 9. Disabling comments after a period of time shows that a blog is unhealthy. On the other hand, Twitter graphics are good if they are functionality too
What you probably missed is to add Subscribe to comments plugin, so commentators can subscribe to individual posts’ comments via email. It is something fantastic!
You should install it too
Some great ideas but my question is “Why should you display the total number of comments”?
What exactly does that show?
@Stuart: if I don’t make a mistake that refers to the total number of comments across the whole blog.
Some great and extremely useful tips and tricks here. Thanks Joel.
Nice tips! I’ll certain add them to my blog!
great list, i’ll bookmark it
thanks for share
very good, thank you
Thanks for some great tips. I’m already implementing some of them, and am checking into displaying the total number of comments.
I would never disable comments on older posts. More than 70% of my traffic comes from search engines, and these readers expect to be able to comment, whatever the age of the post. I believe that disabling comments depends on what kind of blog you have and the kind of content you post, rather than the simple age of the post.
Thanks again!
I can’t say I agree with “points 7. and 9″ either. I have received some new readers via old posts and allowing those to be commented on. Nonetheless you offer some helpful tips.
I prefer a simple comment section than the complicated one. Light for loading and easy to use. Some blogs use very complicated and non user-friendly comment form. You can’t put all the things inside it.
Yeah. Simple. That’s it =)
But that doesn’t meant I disagree with the tips & tricks. They are awesome and beneficial, but just use 2-3 not all of them or you’ll make it complicated.
hey this is a very interesting article!