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15 Plugins to Make your WordPress Comment System Better

How would you like if your blog posts doesn’t gets any readers voice? That is no one comments on it? Wouldn’t you be disappointed? The problem could be that your Comment System is not very interactive or beneficial for readers.

There are actually many ways with which you can improve your wordpress comment system and thus can increase the chances of getting more and better comments on your blog. In this post, I will be sharing 15 very popular wordpress plugins which can surely make your wordpress comment system look more interactive and beneficial.

1. WordPress Threaded Comment:

WP Threaded Comment is a very popular plugin which enables your blog readers to comment on the existing comments thus making the comments appear in a threaded(nested) way. From your Admin panel you can choose various things like whether or not to send the notification email on new reply comments, how everything should look, maximum nested comment level etc.

2. DoFollow:

DoFollow is a simple one click plugin which removes the “no-follow” attribute from your comments and thus making it Do-follow. This helps in providing Link Juice to your commentators as Search Engine will count the links in the comments made by your readers. Try this, It will surely boost your comments as this is the new trend around blogosphere.

3. Top Commentators Widget:

The Top Commentators Widget plugin helps you add a widget in your blog which shows the top commentators name. There are many options to choose in this plugin like to exclude some name, links and e-mails, Option to make the name’s hyper-linked or not, should the plugin add “no-follow” attribute in the list etc.

4. Comment Luv:

Comment Luv is a very interesting plugin as it grabs the feed of the commentator URL and shows a selection of latest article which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit button. This has proven very important and useful in generating more comments on a blog and interactive for the readers.

5. Keyword Luv:

Keyword Luv let’s your readers enter their favorite keyword for which they are optimizing their blog. The keyword appears just after the name and the the keyword is hyper-linked with URL provided by the commentator. This helps the commentators blogs rank better for their keyword with the improved anchor text for their comment.

6. Subscribe To Comments:

Subscribe to Comments is also a very popular plugin which helps your readers get notified via email whenever a new comment is made on the article on which they commented and are subscribed. This plugin provides a simple check box below the comment box and if the commentators ticks it then he gets subscribed to the list.This encourages readers to come back and take part in the conversation.

Well if you have already installed WP Threaded Comment then you might not feel installing as the feature is available in it but let me clear one thing that Subscribe to Comments plugin also provides the list of e-mail address and post on which the readers are subscribed to the comments which is not available in WP Threaded Comment.

7. Comment Relish:

Comment Relish could help prove a very important plugin as it sends a thank-you email to yours blog first time commentators. The message can be changed according to you. This encourages them to come back again and comment regularly i.e they might become your regular reader.

8. WP Ajax Edit Comments:

Humans can make mistakes and WP Ajax Edit Comments helps solve and edit this mistake. Whenever after commenting, your readers feels that he should not have said what he commented or he should have added something more to the comment or he realized typo mistake or some error then this plugin helps them to edit their own comments for a period specified by the Admin. This plugin can help reduce typo mistakes on reader comments and at same time encourage more comments from them.

9. Highlight Author Comments:

Sometimes your readers feels to read only the author comments. Mostly this happens when you write some kind of tutorial or something like that. That time it should be easy for the readers to find your comments and that’s the aim of the Highlight Author Commentsplugin.

As it is clear by name, this plugin highlights the post author comments in distinctive style with no need to edit your template files, etc. All you do is provide a snippet or two of CSS styling to be applied to author posts.

10. Comment Quick Tags:

Comment Quick Tags is very useful plugin as it adds a handy toolbar near the comment box. This toolbar consist easy to use tags like bold, italics, quote and other such simple tags. This provides the choice to your commentators to present their comments in a very beautiful and proper manner.

11. Custom Smilies:

Custom Smilies enables the commentators to make use of smilies easily from the toolbar situated near to comment box. After installing the plugin you can choose or add smilies on your own which you want to appear in the toolbar. This will provide a very usefull interactive feature to your readers.

12. Tiny MCE Comments:

Tiny MCE Comments is a really very powerful plugin as it changes the ordinary comment box into a fully featured rich text editor or What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Editor. That means your commentators gets the functions like available to the author. It will surely make the comment box more interactive to use with the availability of such features.

13. WP Gravatars:

WP Gravatar is very simple to use plugin which adds the required field to your comment section to show up the Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico images with your comments. There is now no need to find any code and do replacing and blah blah. Just Activate this plugin and it’s done.

There is one new similar kind of plugin on which we talked few days back i.e Twittar from SmashingMagazine which adds the Twitter avatars in the comment section by matching the email address to the user’s Twitter email address and if the user doesn’t have twitter then it shows up Gravatar.

Your Commentators will surely love to see their Avatars on your blog.

14. OpenID Comments:

OpenID Comments plugin let’s your readers comment with their openID Identity thus they can make comments by logging with their Google Account, FaceBook Account, Blogger Account, Yahoo Account, WordPress Account or any other OpenID’s.

15. Twitip ID:

Twitip ID is also getting popular amongst bloggers. This plugin adds an extra input field in comment box where people can add their Twitter username. Then this plugin outputs the twitter profile URL after submitting the comment. This helps your readers to share their twitter profileon the blog and gets chance to increase their followers.

These 15 plugins are very usefull to make your wordpress comment sytem much interactive and useful for your readers. Therefore, try it and feel the change it brings to your commen system.

If you are using any other plugin which have helped you improve the interactivity or benefiits of commenting on your blog then don’t forget to share it with me here by commenting below.

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15 Plugins to Boost Up Your WordPress Security and a Special Tip!

WordPress Security is important! A lot of attention is required towards your wordpress blog for making it safe from hackers which many people doesn’t cares or doesn’t take necessary steps for making it safe.

It’s required that bloggers pay attention towards their blog security by not leaving any doors open for the hackers. If a hacker is absolutely determined to get into your blog then they’re probably going to succeed. But you can protect your wordpress quite much by using many plugins out there for wordpress.

Today I am writing about 15 Very important handpicked plugins which can help you to increase your wordpress blog security Level.

1. WP Security Scan

This highly popular Plugin shows two most over looked vulnerabilities in WordPress – the admin username and the table prefix. Both vulnerabilities are fixable and this plugin shows you how to do it. Other than that this plugin removes the WP ID META tag form WordPress core which could help a hacker also it turns off WordPress DB Errors. It have one scanner which brings up a list of files and directories on your server which it checks that they all have the correct permissions rules or chmod.

2. AskApache Password Protect

AskApache Password Protect adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protects your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. as well. In simple words this plugin creates a big wall to protect your wordpress with the use of username and password protection.

It encrypts your password and creates the .htpasswd file, as well as setting the correct security-enhanced file permissions on both. You can also use cPanel Password Protection on a Directory if you are using a cPanel Web Host to password protect wp-admin directory.

3. Stealth Login

This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog. For example you can use URL like “http://www.myblog.com/lol” for logging into your administration panel. This plugin won’t secure your blog absolutely, but if someone does manage to crack or find your password then it can make it difficult for them to find where is login page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Suppose you are freely allowing people to register and submit guest post then what in that case? The answer to this I recieved was that you give them the special URL that you created if you trust them enough. For the most part, guest authors should not even be allowed in the admin panel unless they are authors of your site. If someone has written multiple posts for your blog then they can be trustable so you can give them the special url you created for login. Most top blogs take guest posts via email and if those guest authors become regular authors, only then they are allowed in the admin panel.

4. WordPress Exploit Scanner

Sometimes from the server side or from your PC(while using FTP programs), virus gets uploaded automatically which makes your blog unfavorable to visit. It also did happen to me many times on my affiliate blogs and the result was that Google Shows a Malware Warning Page whosoever visits it.

See one example screenshot to see how Google shows a warning page. In this case actually it didn’t harm my wordpress but my PC was having some junk file which was resulting in this fake page appearance.

But you can solve it easily as most of the times iframe viruses inserts there code into many files of your wordpress blog. WordPress Exploit Scanner searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker. Make sure you use your brain and also take a backup of your database before doing anything.

5. Login LockDown

Login LockDown tracks the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number say 3 attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range for specified time. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

6. Secure WordPress

If you use above plugin i.e Logic Lockdown then I think you should also install Secure WordPress Plugin as it removes error-information on login-page (Logic LockDown will generate error when username-password entered is incorrect).

This plugin can prove important because if a hacker gets one thing wrong, the error message will help him identify it and correct it. Other than this plugin have many other features like:

Adds an index.html file to plugin-directory
Removes the wp-version, except in admin-area
Removes Really Simple Discovery
Removes Windows Live Writer
Remove core update, plugin-update and theme-update information for non-admins

7. Admin SSL

This plug-in will work with both the private and shared SSL connections and it will force a SSL connection in every page where password can or has to be entered like while logging into your wordpress dashboard i.e It will use “https://” instead of “http://”. It is very helpful to protect the admin area, posts and all the pages of your WordPress installation and secure the login page.

NOTE: This plug-in works only from WordPress 2.2 to 2.7.1.

8. AntiVirus

This plugin is very easy to use and it allows you to do manual testing with immediate result of the infected files. It you can also enable the option to scan your wordpress template daily and send a notification email when something infected is found. It’s just like your AnitVirus Software which you use on your computer.

9. WordPress Firewall

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.).

Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night. It will also give you an option to send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack and much more.

10. One Time Passwords

You might have heard about the VeriSign One Time Password for bank cards. Similar to that, this plugin enables you to login to your WordPress blog using passwords which are valid for one session only. One-time passwords prevent stealing of your main WordPress password in less trustworthy environments, like internet cafes, where chances are that anyone, even a noob person can steal your password if he make use of keyloggers programs to capture your information. See How it works.

11. Semisecure Login Reimagined

Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process using an RSA public key to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in. The server then decrypts the encrypted password with the private key. JavaScript is required to enable encryption.

It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator of the blog wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.

12. WP DBManager

It is required that you should always have a backup ready during bad times because no one can say when the evil will attack. WP DBManager allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It also supports automatic scheduling of backing up and then mailing it to your email ID and optimizing of database can also be done automatically.

13. SABRE

Sabre stands for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog. Your visitors are granted permission to register freely on your blog and now you are plagued by fake users automatically created by spammers? Sabre is the solution to stop definitely these robotized visitors!

14. Invisible Defender

This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. Actually almost all the spambots fills in all the fields according to it’s script structure but real humans can’t see these hidden fields thus if all the fields gets filled up then it is considered as a spambot. These two extra fields are hidden with CSS rule, so they will not be visible for most users. Only users with text-based browsers (and very old ones which not support CSS) will see them, but don’t be afraid – plugin has special message for them.

15. WordPress File Monitor

This simple plugin monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files regularly. When a change is detected an email alert is sent to a specified address. It also gives you the ability to exclude directories from scan (for instance if you use a caching system like WP Super Cache that stores its files within the monitored zone).

THE SPECIAL TIP

It has been found that wordpress plugins can play a crucial role for hacking any wordpress blog. This is because some people download wordpress plugins from such sources where chances are that the plugin downloaded may contain some bad commands which are meant to take control over your blog through certain commands inputed inside the php file of that plugin.

The Screenshot below shows one secret website which I used during my olden days which I don’t think should be dis-closed here. In the screenshot you can see many listed plugins which are named towards some popular plugins but will cause damage to your wordpress blog.

So Keep these 2 things in mind before downloading and using any plugin:

1. I think you should always try your best to download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

2. Many times the plugin maker doesn’t finds time or useful to list his plugin in the wordpress directory. In that case make sure you are downloading from Original source but before doing that first look at the comments made by people on that plugin to know whether or not it’s causing any problem or not. Also completely make sure that it is really the original plugin maker site because sometime what happens that hackers make review of the plugin on their fake blogs and place their download link which contains their bad plugin! So always Keep these things in mind.

Some great articles on Securing your WordPress:

Hardening WordPress from WordPress Codex
Three tips to protect your WordPress installation from Matt Cutts
10 Steps to Protect Admin Area in WordPress from SmashingMagzine
Protect Your Admin folder in WordPress by Limiting Access in .htaccess from WP Beginner
Protecting Your WordPress Blog from Lorelle

Hope you will find this article very useful for strengthning your wordpress. If you are also using any plugin to secure your wordpress then don’t hesitate to tell us here by making a comment.

These two extra fields are hidden with CSS rule, so they will not be visible for most users. Only users with text-based browsers (and very old ones which not support CSS) will see them, but don’t be afraid – plugin has special message for them.