If your WordPress-based blog gets a lot of comments, it can be a pain to keep up on them.

Approving/spamming comments is sadly something that has to be done frequently, otherwise the unmoderated comments tend to pile up. Let’s face it, if you run a fairly high-traffic blog, you don’t want to trek over to the WordPress Admin to moderate comments.

That’s where Daniel Dura’s “Moderator” comes in. Moderator is an Adobe AIR app that brings the unmoderated comments to you. It sits in your Dock or System Tray and notifies you as the comments stack up in the queue. From there, you can approve, spam, or delete the comments after reading them.

The app requires WordPress 2.6+, and you must install a WordPress plugin before using the app. Once WP 2.7 is out, the developer will release a new version of Moderator to take advantage of 2.7’s comment API, which will make the plugin unneccesary.

Now that automatic comment spam is becoming less effective, thanks to tools like Akismet, the miscreant marketters are addding a new few tricks to their their arsenal.

According to Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection, spammers are paying people to write long and intelligent comments on your posts. These comments look like any other comment, except perhaps a little longer, but the author link points to a spam site.

Since automattic spamming of blogs has mostly been reduced to a trickle due to the likes of Akismet, spammers are now individually targeting blog posts with highly relevant, and in many cases highly convincing comments. I moderated and subsequently spammed a comment today that was over a hundred words long, on the pros and cons of one of the themes on our daily theme posts. I thought the comment was a very well written review of theme until I looked closely. The URI of the poster was a refinancing Made For AdSense page.

In other words: It’s getting far to hard to tell the difference between a legit comment and a spam comment. (more…)

I’m not the only one who thinks MyBlogLog is a waste of valuable template space. It clutters an otherwise (hopefully) clean design, makes pages take longer to load, and doesn’t really provide much value to the reader. Do you pay any attention to MyBlogLog widgets when you visit a blog, or do you ignore them like I do?

Now, MyBlogLog is an interesting concept, but it has some issues, and I’m sure a lot of you avoid it for the same reasons I do.

Recently, I came up with something a bit more interesting…

Okay, obviously you like to recieve comments on your blog postings, and it’s nice to offer a small reward to people who frequently contribute to the discussions. Thus, many of us have “Top Commentators” sections on our blogs, which generally show frequent commenters’ names and link to their websites.

After reading Blog Herald’s post on MyBlogLog (see above link), I thought “Why not have a recent/top commentators section on a blog that displays Gravatars linked to the commentators’ uls instead of just names?” (From my Twitter.)

Obviously this is a plugin waiting to happen, but I’m too lazy to throw one together yet. If anyone wants to take my idea and build something, feel free to do so. (If you do build a plugin, I’d like an email so I can try it out myself…)

And here’s the plugin: Gravatar Top Commenters.

Comments are one of my favorite parts of blogging. It’s nice to be able to give some feedback on a post you enjoy, disagree with, or have something to add to. You really notice how much you like having the ability to leave a comment when you read a site like The New York Times…because they don’t allow comments on their articles.

Commenting can help promote your blog subtly and effectively, but remember that comments are first and foremost about discussion.

What are some good practices to use when commenting? Here are a few articles on that note:

• 10 Ways to Optimize Blog Comments
• The Blogger’s Guide to Comment Etiquette
• Consider These Things When Commenting
• How NOT to Comment on Comments

The default comments template included in the Kubrick theme, and by extension a lot of other freely available themes, isn’t very interesting. It suits the theme, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, ready for use in any theme. If you go through the trouble of finding or creating a more unique theme, shouldn’t the comments be styled differently as well? It surprises me how many blog themes have pretty much the same comment style as Kubrick.

Whether you’re putting together your own theme from scratch, or customizing an existing one, don’t neglect the comments. After all, you want to draw readers to them, don’t you?

Here are a couple places to read-up on the comment template:

• Styling Your Wordpress Comments
• Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File

Also, be sure to add Gravatar support!