Simple Top Commenters Widget WordPress Plugin
Simple and elegant.
Have you ever wanted to show a simple list of the top commenters on your blog? Well now you can with this very simple, lightweight, and customizable WordPress Plugin.
There are two significant reasons why this might be something you want to do for your blog:
- It shows your appreciation for your community since you list the top commenters and links back to their properties!
- It shows new visitors that there are conversations that are happening and that they need to jump in!
Neat, right? Here are a list of the features:
Simple options!
- Lightweight and well coded. Low cost in terms of page load speed.
- Customizable title
- Can choose to show a particular “Date Range” such as Weekly, Monthly, or All Time!
- Direct link to commenter’s URL for some link love.
- Option to show Gravatar
- Option to hide the total amount of comments
- Easy to customize via CSS for your own blog
We’ve taken a classic and typical need for a blogger and streamlined the code, simplified the options, and made it just easier to use!
Let us know your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to check out the other WordPress Plugins that I’ve released!
And, of course, don’t forget the WordPress Themes!
I have been thinking about adding something like this.
Thanks John! Again…
sure thing adam! drop @moretom some props too!
Loving this idea man.
Adding it shortly.
how is your small biz coming along?
It’s actually growing well brother. Calling a few new clients today across the US.
By the way, when you select up “show avatars” if they don’t there is no default, it’s just a “broken image”image.
will take a look.
Also a very cool option would to include a number, so instead of 10 I could do 5 or 2 etc.
sweet! we’ll look into it.
And I am back hahaha. Wondering if this could be put outside of the sidebar on Standard Theme. Wondering if I could add it to say the author box area?
I am sure I could reverse engineer it, but if there is an easy that would be cool.
I am sure you could!
Love the header on your site. Did you do it yourself?
it is pretty cool, right? geek4him is cool.
Very nice. Unfortunately, I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog so I would look lame if I installed this plug-in.
This would also be something cool to add to Standard Theme.
good thought. will consider it!
I don’t think it would be lame at all John!
Throw it on your site and it might even encourage people to comment and get more comments because of it.
agreed! might encourage comments..
i totally agree here.
Try it out for a couple weeks or so and if it doesn’t help, take it off. That’s what I’m going to try on my newish blog.
cool. that’s a good idea.
Brilliance. Thanks John. I’ve been thinking about rewarding my top commenters and this will make that easy to track. I think you should try and be a little MORE helpful with this blog
sorry.
Yea I think a reward for top commenters is a cool idea.
What would you like as a reward, Rob?
Hmmmm – what I’d really like is 30-60 minutes of mentoring with geeky wordpress stuff.
Or a stuffed panda.
haha. stuffed panda.
hmm. that is cool.
People love to be recognize for their efforts on your site..this just encourage them to do more to stay on top..
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
do you know that you’re missing a quote?
shouldn’t it be…
” Black Seo Guy ‘ Signing Off ‘ ” ?
Bahahahahaha!
I’m going to comment just to stay in the rankings
But seriously, This is a cool plug-in idea. I’ still learning how to do this community thing and it’s really helpful to see who is engaged. So, I checked out Dustin’s site which is awesome.
sweet! that’s the point. give some love back to those that are hanging out here!
Where would I change the number of commenters it shows?
Never mind. Figured it out. Thanks!
sure thing ashley
Hey! There I am!
Anyway, I like this! Installing now on all my blogs!
And I used the “Tabber Widget” to include tabs for all three options: Weekly, Monthly, and All Time.
Hmmm. For some reason, the Tabber Widget doesn’t work with the Standard Theme. Just FYI.
hmm. what is the plugin? link?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tabber-widget/
sweet. thanks.
Thanks for the plug-in John. Installed and in use.
word up! enjoy!
Great plugin!
Is there any way to track the top commenters without this? I have wordpress.com so I can’t use plugins.
ah. don’t think they have it for .com… you need to get on your own .org!
I know! haha. I just can’t find a reason to drop about $12 a month on hosting for a site that only gets about 150 pageviews a day. My most has been 180. Do you still think it is worth it?
if you see yourself having it grow, then yes.
You can get cheaper hosting than that. I pay about $4/month and it’s pretty decent.
where are you?
I paid $3.50/month for iPage.com
huh. that’s a decent cost.
there’s a trick to it though. they offer a $4.50/month and once you begin registering, if you try to navigate away from the site, a pop-up window will come and say if you stay on the page, it will give you a special $3.50/month deal.
hahah! hack!
Thanks John and Tom!
wah wah!
brilliant! love this. thx, john!
sure thing dustin!
I’ve wanted this for a while and was getting ready to go searching for one! Now I don’t have to!
Thanks, you’ve included all the features I wanted.
sweet! glad we could help!
It’s cool to find all the answers here…haha!
thanks brandon! i don’t have all of them… but i can help point you in the right direction!
Oh, this rocks my face off! Thanks for yet ANOTHER awesomesauce plugin John!
Awesome. I swear that you read my mind… I was just dreaming about this the other day. Regulataaaas….mount up!
This brings me back to the days when MTV still played Music Videos….(a reminicent sigh)
haha.
Will this work if I use intensedebate for comments?
It bases it’s ranking on the values stored in your WordPress installation’s database.
If IntenseDebate dupes comments on your server, then you should be good.
Will try it out on my blog and see if I can get some more comments!!
sweet! try it!
This is hawt! I love it!
Does anyone know if it is compatible with Disqus?
it should be since disqus does mirror the comment count from WP native (if you have that setting on).
It would be great to honor the commenter that reaches a number of comments, for example a little medal image.
Have an award option in the widget, put the number of comments for that and when someone reaches the number, gets the little medal.
Great plugin, thanks for sharing.
peter,
love this idea. let me do some thinking…
Cool !
I would really love this to give a price to my readers if they participate enough in the site, like a little incentive for opinions.
word.
Cool one!Tweaked the Css a little.
sweet!
Love this. Is there a way to take out my comments? I’m listed twice (#1 and #3) for some reason
.
did you use a different email address?
not sure I’ve ever entered any address….i either reply in the WP admin panel or the WP iPhone app.
hmm. at this point you can’t unless you do it manually via code. i wanted to keep this plugin pretty small and lightweight.
I noticed today that it suddenly started counting my own comments on my blog… It was after I updated WordPress… Anybody else have this happen?
Just kidding… It seems to have corrected itself.
#yay!
Hi, I found something strange. If a user has an URL, that URL goes to all the users with URL. So, the last one to comment, populates the same URL to all users in the widget with an URL.
Any ideas or fix ?
hmm. show me?
Sure thing, you ca see it here.
ah, you’re using a facebook integration piece? not sure we accounted for that use-case. i’ll have to look into it.
Well, its Disqus, so people can choose to write from different profiles, but the comments are stored in wordpress as normal comments do.
So that breaks the things ?
Thanks for checking it out, because there are a lot of users out there with Disqus, maybe with the same problem without knowing why.
yeah. i’ll have to see. not sure i tested comprehensively with 3rd party commenting systems.
Hello
Does it work on WP 3.1.3 and 3.2?
In my blog people cannot register, only anonymous people can comment.
Will the “NAME” be shown by this plugin as the author?
I would like to award the top commenters of the month. I understand there may be duplicated names, however I would award the most commenting email address….
Do you think I can achieve it with this plugin?
ues, it should. i’m not using registrations too, so people show in the sidebar.
Yeah thanks, I tried it… however if two anonymous “Jenny” comment the site, even if they have different emails, their comments get “merged” and it looks like there is only 1 Jenny.
Eg.
Jenny asda@dafa.com adds 4 comments
Jenny sdgfas@asfsa.net adds 2 comments
The plugin shows that Jenny added 6 comments, but there are two different Jennies
ah. hmm. doh! i’d have to update the plugin a bit. not sure when i can get to it!
I hope you can
And I hope you can add the following feature… which is original and no other plugin has that.
You know, I want to award Jenny for her amount of posts… but the second Jenny may think she was the “winner”…. when there are many Jennies, it may be difficult for them to believe that the results are true.
So I suggest the following:
when somebody click on “Jenny” (whether it is registered user on unregistered) will open a new page where there are listed all the comments that this Jenny left in the selected time frame (eg. last month).
In this way the users can see that the statistics are TRUE and not fake. They will see the amount of comments, the text of the comments, where the comments was left (eg. post title), and the date when the comment was left.
You could also call this plugin “Top commenters award”
I hope you could do such a plugin! It would be original, awsome and very, very useful
cool. i’ll put it on my list of things to look into.
Excellent – this post answers a couple of questions I was going to ask you anyway (does it have to be weekly? Can I get one too?
Thanks for this John.
Hey John, my top commenters plugin is showing my own comments. Is there any way to get rid of that?
it shouldn’t… are you logged in as admin?
Hi there. I like your plugins. Question about Top Commenters: Is it possible to make the avatars a teensy bit bigger? Thank you for your help.
you could hack teh plugin to do this, for sure.
I’m guessing that if this is used on a group blog, there’s no way to easily exclude the other blog authors from the list, right? Trying to make it appear that there’s someone besides us commenting on our awesome, awesome posts.
ah. you could add some code to take away certain authors but that would require a bit of… yes, code.
So…you’re telling me there’s a chance? (name that movie)
That’s what I figured. I think the actual solution to this issue is: get more people to comment. OR…make the other authors comment less frequently. OR…figure it out.
there are some other options out there i believe too dorian!
Hi John,
I uploaded this plugin and liked the look of it, but there was no way for me to put exception names in it. Example: I want to exclude my own comments, family comments, and some people prefer to just not have their name there.
Is there a way to do this. I was using the ‘top commenters’ plugin, but wanted to use yours instead.
Plus, I wanted to capture all the top commenters from August 1 to August 31, but it doesn’t pick them all up.
Let me know if there is a way to fix the month thing and the exceptions thing. Thanks Sally
i’d have to look into it to see if i can customize a bit.
Let me know when you are able to do that or have a different one made with more features. Thanks. SAlly
Thanks for this! But one thing, how can I remove the border around the widget? (The border makes it fall outside of my sidebar a bit.)
you can do this via CSS.
I have the ‘Date Range’ set to monthly. Now that we just entered a new month, the number of commenters it lists dropped greatly. (I don’t get a whole lot of comments, but enough that this is full by months end.) I’m guessing this is because the ‘monthly’ date range goes by calendar month. A great option to add to the date range choices might be “last 30 days”, or something like that.
craig,
you are right. let me take a look.
Hey I found this site to be very fascinating! Bookmarked!
Does this plugin work with facebook comments ?
Thanks man. It seems to be very good.
But, does this plugin work with facebook comments ?
nope. not yet.
Is there a way to remove yourself from the top comments? I would feel a bit guilty having myself at the top of the list.
you could do this via a little code. i might add it later.
Thanks John. I’ll have to look into the code and edit it to remove my name from the list.
Got some help with this over the weekend and was able to remove my name. Pretty simple to code it when you know what you’re doing!
Thanks for sharing. NOT!
So Joe, please share your code.