Must-have WordPress stuff - part 10: Boost comments and discussion

Written by Tom Ackermann on August 12th, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Writing comments is a great way to get some publicity and some backlinks. For the author of a post, comments are the best way to get feedback, reviews and different opinions from the readers - and sometimes they result in an extensive discussion about a post. People who participate in such a discussion usually come back regularly to check for new replies. In other words: The more discussions you have on your blog, the more returning readers you get - that’s why we want to encourage commenting and discussing

And because this is one of my Must-have WordPress stuff posts, I’ll introduce two plugins to improve the commenting feature in WordPress:

The subscribe to comments plugin adds a small checkbox to the comment form and allows the commenter to opt-in for new comments. So whenever somebody posts a new comment, the subscribed commenter gets an email notification with a direct link to the discussed post - probably the easiest way to generate returning readers

To make the whole commenting easier, the WordPress Thread Comment plugin adds the ability to reply to one specific post. The reply gets displayed directly under the parent post instead of being added to the end of the thread. You probably have seen scenarios where somebody ask a question and the answer comes 6 posts later - things are a lot clearer with this plugin. Feel yourself encouraged to leave a comment here to try it.