28MAY

Top Commentator plugin – to use or not to use?

I have the Do-Follow plugin on this blog. I also installed a Top Commentator here as well. The Do-Follow plugin is to benefit those who posted comments because the link you gave here will follow you back to your blog. Whatever that is, just trust the gurus that it is good. They say use it, so I did. You see, when you first started blogging and you have not ‘ink’ the internet, you need to get your name or your blog name to be known to the search engines.

If say, you leave a comment with a unique name on some bloggers’ blogs, you have left a trademark there which will be found by the search engines. I am sure many of you who just started blogging knows that when you search for your own name, you are not likely to find your own blog but rather those ID you use in Flickr or some other community sites or some bloggers with high PR. In the long run, if everyone in your clique use it, soon, there will be a lot of link love amongst the group.

Now, let’s add the Top Commentator plugin to the fun. I bet you have noticed that those people with high page ranks like PR6/10 and above are very reluctant to link you. Don’t bother trying because the higher they go, the more snobbish they get. Serious! :P But if they installed the Top Commentator’s plugin and if you are hard up enough, you go and polish and shine the PR6/10 and above shoes everyday. Some even posted like 6 comments in one blog post alone. This is just so, so lame.

And as we go along, we tend to gather too many links on the sidebar. So, I decided to use the Top Commentator plugin. You can modify the plugin using the plugin editor in your wordpress dashboard.

top_commentator

You can download the Top Commentators widget from Webgrrrl. Just drop the widget into your sidebar and modify it a bit.

Doris asked me how I hide some of the names. Here’s how…

top_commentator2

In the Plugin editor, just change what they suggested. I had added my own name and some people I had dissed so that it doesn’t show. Plus, I change the count from yearly to monthly as and when I like. Read the thing carefully and it makes sense and the instructions are quite clear.

But is it good to use the Top Commentator plugin? Not really. Unless you have control of your spam comments. Plus use the Comment Timeout plugin so that you close the comment of the older posts. You certainly do not want the top commentators of your blog to be spammers, do you?

BTW, if your comments aren’t that pretty, there is no point in installing it. :)

Post Author: lilian

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9 thoughts on “Top Commentator plugin – to use or not to use?”

    Andrew Ooi

    (May 28, 2007 - 7:25 am)

    I’m glad you are not snobbish as other PR6 websites :)

    Actually they are snobbish for a reason. If they give out too many link love they may suffer ‘leakages’ where Google may punish them as they look like a link farm or something.

    So 5xmom, you are PR5 right now on this site. Will you change your mind about the no-follow tag when your reach PR6? :)

    pablopabla

    (May 28, 2007 - 9:21 am)

    Hmm….this one is worth plugging in. But that means I might have to remove one of the other stuffs on my sidebar. Too many things liao.

    KennyP

    (May 28, 2007 - 10:34 am)

    I like the plugin, to use or not, all depends on Lilian yourself :D

    hongkiat

    (May 28, 2007 - 10:44 am)

    That’s a good plugin actually. I’m planning to install it on my new theme later on but you might want to monitor sikit as people like to spam up the top commenter list with keywords instead of their names.

    http://www.5xmom.com is pr 4 btw, but without (www) its only pr3. Lilian are you using google webmastertool? it helps google understand your domain better.

    papajoneh

    (May 28, 2007 - 1:02 pm)

    i know i can’t comment in here anymore. the spam karma really me hate now. :( and i not even a spammer. if you look into all my comments, all related to the post.
    anyway, thats new. I never thought Lorna got her own widget. Im still using the original version 1.02 from pfadvice.com but with homemade php widget. :)

    lilian

    (May 28, 2007 - 1:24 pm)

    papajoneh – I pun tak tau how to rescue you already. LOL, I kena sieve through hundreds of spam to find papaJ in the pile.

    hongkiat – I tried the other day but it screwed up the whole path and I got chicken out. I think I will ask Bryan for help when he is back. But in PPP, they follow the higher PR so I am not so worried.

    kennyP – Yeah, I like it too but use on only two blogs.

    pablo – Yeah, trimming and pruning is good.

    andrew – LOL, I never think that far wor.

    Linky Love

    (May 28, 2007 - 10:14 pm)

    Got a bit more spam when I installed the dofollow and the commentators plugin. Yet by activating wordpress akismet and adding a catchpa plugin on my comments: it’s smooth sailing (better not jinx it further…)

    Where u get this “notify me by email” under this comment?

    Doris

    (May 28, 2007 - 11:27 pm)

    Thanks for the tip,Lilian. I guess I can only install this top commentator plugin when i have a wider template or it will look so cluttered lo… wait til I get my 2 new blogs up first :)

    Maria

    (October 10, 2007 - 11:26 am)

    I didn’t know such a good plugin exists! I will make sure I install it on my blog later on… sounds like a must have plugin.

    Anyway, I haven’t installed WordPress on my website. Will need a bit of time to do that. Have downloaded Top Commentator plugin though. Thanks for the recommendation.

    One thing I don’t understand. In Firefox, whenever I click anywhere on your page (on any empty space), you page will just reloads for a split second. Why is that so? :)

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