Random Ramblings

In my opinion Comments are life blood of a blog. And its essential to keep the conversation going back and forth rather than just post a critical comment or remark and moving on. To encourage your readers to come back to check on their comment replies most blogs have the Subscribe to comments plugin. This is a nice plugin that sends the comment author a notification email everytime a new comment is posted to a blog post on which he/she has commented on.

Now this isn’t bad, is it? The plugin does what is set out to do, subscribe you to the comments of a blog post. But Imagine this, you post a comment on a blog post you’ve liked and the author has replied to your comment as well and you then want to leave it there. You now have to unsubscribe from your previous subscription. If you don’t unsubscribe you’ll continue to receive notification mail whenever someone comments on that post, even a few weeks after you’ve read and commented on it.

Thats not such a bad thing but lets consider this from the point of view of the commentator. His/her mailbox is constantly receiving emails for comment notifications that they posted weeks or even months ago. And this person who is probably also a busy blogger has to spend precious time scanning these emails, when they could be writing the next most popular article or visiting some blog or commenting on another blog or doing some research or blog maintenance. Do you think someone who has had such an experience will consider subscribing to the comments the next time he/she is commenting. I don’t think so!

Well thanks to fellow blogger Sire I’ve stumbled upon a plugin that not only solves this problem but also presents the comments in a threaded format, so you can easily follow the conversation, if your theme doesn’t do it already. Its called WordPress Threaded Comments.

This plugin does just what I really want as a comment reply notifier. The commentator is sent a notification email only if a reply is posted to the comment posted by the commentator. Thus the commentator does not have to worry about getting too many emails and be assured that any notification email received is for a reply to a comment that he/she has posted, hence the email will draw prompt attention to itself.

I’ve installed this plugin on my blog and it works fine. I encourage you to get this plugin too and don’t let your commentators drown in the flood of notification emails.

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Tags: Comments, Subscribe to comments, Wordpress, wordpress threaded comments

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 2:00 am and is filed under Blogging, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.