Why WordPress Comments System Sucks!

Somebody set the bar so freaking low for blog commenting systems. It’s probably the guy who invented the guestbook — damn him!

Or maybe it’s a cartel. Blog developers got together and said, “Managing comments is needlessly difficult. Let’s not compete on who has the best commenting features — agreed?”

Or maybe blog developers just quietly kept their fingers crossed hoping that no competitor will start making the effort to improve blog comments.

I don’t know. All I know is that WordPress commenting sucks! Here’s why:

The Boring Text Box

Blog developers couldn’t be any less creative. A comment text box is the simplest, most basic, most primitive, text box there is. My dog can make a comment text box. In fact, here — I’ll call him. Come here boy, make a comment text box…

“wuf wuf <textarea></textarea> wuf”

Gooood boy!

Sigh…a dog shouldn’t be able to make a blog commenting system. A commenting system should be exciting…even to a human. It should contain essential features like image and video embedding, rich text editing, preview button, and more.

Learn From Forum Software

Forum applications like vBulletin, phpBB, and even Simple:Press have rich editing features that make forum posting an enjoyable experience.

Why can’t a WordPress commenting form have features like this?

I’m not saying it should be as ugly as vBulletin — just as functional.

Blogs are mainstream now. Simply telling commenters what HTML tags are allowed was fine when blogs were the exclusive domain of geeks. But average Joe commenter today needs a robust WYSYWIG form. A form that can:

Show text styling, i.e. bold, italic, underlined
Embed images and videos
Allow safe source code embedding, i.e. sharing HTML and other source code in the comments
And do pretty much everything that a vBulletin form can do

But implementing rich editing forms in comments also requires the ability to preview and edit comments.

Preview and Edit Comments

With the current implementation, leaving a comment on a WordPress site requires guts. That plain and rigid text box doesn’t tolerate flip flopping. If you leave a comment, that’s it for you. You can’t edit or delete your comment. You better be 100% sure your comment says what you really mean. Have your friend or spouse or roommate proof read your comment before submitting — or make a printout, stand up and read it out loud to yourself.

But if developers took the time to implement comment preview and editing in WordPress, things would be more relaxed.

No wonder most commenters nowadays say little more than “Great post. Thank you!” Anything more than that is understandably risky because the only way to have a comment edited is to contact the blog owner, which only makes comment moderation in WordPress more tedious that it already is…

Comment Moderation is a Chore

Comment notifications

Sometimes comments will be automatically approved and posted to your blog. You’ll wanna know about that by email. Other times comments will be held for moderation and you’ll also want to know when that happens by email.

But will you want to know — by email — that a comment — you just approved — has been posted to the blog? Probably not. But WordPress is too stupid to realize that. It’ll send you an email when a comment is held for moderation and then it’ll immediately send you another email when you have approved the comment.

The moderation email

What’s also annoying is the email you get for comment moderation. You are presented with a list of links to approve, mark as spam, or trash a comment. These links are supposed to make it quicker for you to moderate comments:

Seeing these links, you would get the mistaken impression that each link does something different. But they all do one thing — they take you to your WordPress blog where you can then do the actual comment moderation. Why the need for the two-step process, I don’t know.

Sifting through spam comments

Less than 24 hours have passed since I emptied the spam box on this site. Guess what the spam count is right now? 140. There’s no way am I gonna check for false positives. But it would help if Akismet (or whoever) separated most-likely-spam from maybe-spam comments by highlighting comment rows in the spam box.

Subscribing to Comment Notifications by Email

Forums allow you to subscribe to threads by email. Similarly, a commenter should know when someone has replied to her comment. This feature is too important to be left to plugins. The plugins that currently provide this feature suffer from many problems and limitations. They don’t even allow a commenter to only subscribe to replies. She has to subscribe to all comments left on the post, so she has to be ready for a barrage of “Thank you. Great Post!!!”

How to Improve WordPress Commenting

It’s tough. There isn’t any combination of plugins that you can install to improve commenting on WordPress. I have tested many plugins that are supposed to give you rich editing, post-submit editing and preview, and reply notifications. Each plugin is broken in one serious way or another.

You can try comment hosting services like IntenseDebate and Disqus. But those are fundamentally stupid. What’s so challenging about managing comments that it needs to be outsourced to “specialists”?

What’s worse is that these specialized services are quirky, fragile, difficult to style/theme, and if they don’t want or can’t implement a feature, there is nothing you can do about it. I recommend that you don’t bother with comment hosting services.

A great commenting system should be a built-in part of WordPress. Or if the enhanced system must come in the form of a plugin, then the plugin has to be made by someone who understands PHP, front-end development, and WordPress very intimately. It would make a killer premium plugin!