I like commenting on blogs. Unfortunately, plain vanilla WordPress blogs don’t make it easy to join and stay in the conversation. You can use two plugins to fix that problem on your blog.
Filosofo Comments Preview. Nothing’s worse than typing an intelligent and articulate comment on a blog, complete with HTML codes for links and formatting, and then having all that work stripped out. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s worse when I make a mistake and some HTML codes appear in the comment as text. Even “worser” still is that with most WordPress blogs it’s a crap shoot: I have no idea what will happen before I click “Post” and then it’s too late — the comment is now live and I can’t edit it.
Filosofo Comments Preview allows your commenters to preview their comments before posting. They can write their comments, preview them, and then edit them before clicking the “Post” button. I don’t understand why this capability isn’t part of the WordPress core.
Subscribe to Comments. Once I leave a comment, I like to see how others respond. But I read blogs in an RSS reader and wouldn’t see anyone else’s comments. Sure, I could grab the post’s comment feed, but I often forget.
Subscribe to Comments makes it easy for your commenters. A check box by the comment form lets commenter choose to be e-mailed whenever another comment is posted. Who knows — they might come back and post again.
I’m sure there are other plugins that provide essentially the same features, but these are two plugins I know work because I use them. Do you?
Update. I received a question how to make the”Post” and “Preview” buttons sit next to each other. I use the following CSS with the K2 theme:
#commentform #submit, #commentform #preview {
display:inline;
float:right;
font-weight:bold;
}
Update 2. I had three (!) mistakes in the first selector for my sample style; it is now correct. I should have used Firebug to inspect my “Post” and “Preview” buttons before posting the first update…