One more post on the ‘respond to comments‘ post that I wrote yesterday.
If you’re a WordPress user there are a number of WP plugins that can help with managing your comments and responding to readers. Here are some that might be worth exploring.
1. Better Comments Manager – this plugin allows you to respond to comments on your blog as you moderate them in the comments area of WP’s back end. So instead of seeing a comment come in, having to then visit the post and responding from there you can simply hit ‘reply’ from within the comments section and you’ll be taken to a page where you can leave a responding comment. It also puts a ‘view all’ link in your comments area that allows you to quickly see all the comments on a post – still staying in the back end of WP. Here’s the two links as you’ll see them in your comments area:
2. Comment Relish – this plugin sends and automatic email message to users on your website who have never commented before. I’m seeing more and more bloggers using this – generally giving a quick thank you for the comment, a link back to the post and blog and a mention of their RSS feed etc. Be a little careful of making your comment too ‘auto generated’ and if you want to make your emails more personal check out how my good friend Alister uses it. Here’s another similar plugin called Comment Email Responder.
3. Subscribe to Comments – this won’t help you respond to comments but will help your readers know when you have as it sends an email when new comments are added to a post that they’ve subscribed to. While I don’t use this here at ProBlogger at the moment (in a previous version I had a bug) it is something I’ve used on other blogs and have found very effective.
4. WP Comment Moderation Notifier – get notified on your desktop when a new comment comes in that needs moderation. This is a new one that I only found today via John TP.
5. Threaded Comments – Ben and I have talked about using this in the new ProBlogger design but have resisted so far as it can get a little messy. However it is one way of helping readers to have more dialogue in their comments.
Want more Comment Plugins for WordPress? Check out the WP Codex page for Plugins for Comments.
Which WordPerss plugins do you use to help managed your Comments?
