Automate Comment Closing
WordPress Plugins: Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Yes! I found a great comment solution for myself! The WordPress plugin: Comment Timeout.
I like having comments, it’s a fun added feature for readers, gives an added sense of community and sometimes even has nice feedback… for today’s comic. After that they move into the archive, where new readers might drop a comment or two, but the discussions are not active so it doesn’t really matter, also they become a good target for spambot comments. The worst is when I went on hiatus for a bit, the most recent comic racking up about 400 comments until I closed it, mostly from becoming basically a chatroom.
To me, for my Webcomic, a daily feature, the real value in the comments is for that day. The discussions are quite possibly even only relative to that day. Even my blog posts at my comic tend to be posts that are timely and only current discussion is necessary. That may be different for some sites, like this ComicPress site, it has some tips and features that are basically timeless. Some of the discussions can be ongoing. Someone might find this very post a year from now and make a mention of another plugin that would be helpful for this very thing.
But with my Webcomic site, I’ve decided I want the comments closed after the moment has passed. I’ve considered just removing the comments code from the theme’s single.php file, so that no comments would even show up in the archive. But I decided I didn’t want to do that just yet, I’d leave the comments in there as added content. I also don’t want to have to manually close hundreds of posts, and then remember every day to close older posts.
This is where this WordPress plugin has come in handy, it’s called Comment Timeout. You can set comments to close on posts after a certain amount of time, I figure 2 or 3 days gives people a chance to get there’s in. If it was a weekly comic maybe you’d want it to close after 7 or even 14 days. There’s other options as well, like not closing if people are still actively posting comments to the post, or if the post is “popular”.
It’s a nifty plugin if you only want to keep current discussion on your site and your archive is getting big and becoming a net for collecting old comments that clutter and bog down the database.
