Some comments are pure SPAM, easily destroyed by Akismet with the click of a button. Others type of semi-legit comments however are much harder to deal with.
For example, you’ll find a lot of people post legitimate and meaningful comments but stuff the “Name” column with keywords for their website (some smart SEO guru told them that’s how it’s done). Others may drop their signature link (s) in the comment itself. This makes it difficult for you to moderate, and previously you just had to live with it.
Here’s a solution: Clearly display a “comment policy” on your blog, help your readers self-moderate their comments, and save loads of time.
Using the Comment Policy Plugin for WordPress you’ll be able to do just that. Tell your readers what type of comments are acceptable, and which ones are not.
How It Looks Like on Your Blog
On your blog’s comment form, readers will see your comment policy. They can then read what you will – or will not – accept in comments. This alone will significantly reduce the amount of keyword stuffing, signature links etc as you let your readers know what happens if their comments don’t adhere to your policy.
Let them self-moderate their comments before submitting it, saving you tons of precious blogging hours.
You can edit the appearance of the policy display completely using the Custom CSS box. Making it match the overall look of your blog is easy. You can automatically place the policy display on your comments form, or manually insert his code to where you want your policy to appear:
<?php comments_policy(); ?>
Easy Policy Editor for Admin
As a blog admin you can easily edit your policy, taking the default bullet points and text as a base. You can add a opening and closing statement, and rearrange the order of the bullet points. You can add more bullet points, temporarily disable some, and of course permanently delete bullets.
Once you have installed the plugin and activated it, you will see a new “Comments Policy” link right beneath the Comments section. We’ve put it in the most obvious place 
The most important thing is that if you own many blogs, you can create your comments policy in one blog and just export it, save it to your computer. On your other blogs, install Comments Policy and export the .json file to automatically re-create your policy.
Of course all this isn’t too hard to do if you’re good at HTML and know how to edit your WordPress theme – but hey this plugin does all the dirty work for you.
You can even download or create a sophisticated plugin that automatically searches comments based on your criteria and delete them.
You may find however, that prevention is way better than the cure.
Changelog / Versions
22 December 2009
- Version 1.2
-Compatible with Wordpress 2.9
14 August 2009
- Version 1.1
-Compatible with Wordpress 2.8.4
-Fix minor bug
01 August 2009
- Version 1.0 – Comments Policy released
Thanks for the great plugin. It works perfectly! Love the fact that theres a widget AND being able to have a testimonials page. Ive tried at least two other plugins, and they dont match the functionality of Testimonials Manager.
The Testimonials Manager plugin works a treat!! I've used mine in the sidebar on one of my blogs; extremely easy to set up and it really looks the part!
Testimonials Manager is an awesome plugin. Best of its kind that I have found.
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Great plugin, will plug that in! Thanks.
Marian
good stuff, bro!
P/S: Not a SPAM comment. Just a short and sweet compliment. Keke..
–Dennis.
This is great plug in. Definitely I hate SPAM comments.
great plugin there…thanks!
I don’t have a current blog. Have been re-building after a disaster, but am just about ready to set up a new one. My old blog was plagued by this sort of nonsense and created a lot of unnecessary work. Thank you. Much appreciated.
thanks gobala,
You are very kind to help. Please keep the good work up!
Jayshree
Works great, thank you
I like the plug-in, but the policy should really be above the comment box. It will be a lot of surfers who don’t see the policy because they don’t scroll down the page far enough to see it. Otherwise it looks like a good shot at fighting spam.
Thanks.
Mike
@ Mike – Exactly, it should be above the Submit button. But unfortunately it can only appear automatically at the bottom of the button, due to WordPress limitations (correct me if im wrong). That’s why you can also manually paste the code into your comments.php file above the button to make it even more effective.
Thank you so much for this! I have been battling with this problem!
I have several niche blogs. Sometimes I leave comments unapproved for weeks, because I don’t have time to decide about the borderline ones. (The obvious spam I delete immediately.)
This give everyone clear warning and should make life much easier!
Sheesh! So simple an idea … why hadn’t any of us thought of this before! Doh!
Thanks for creating this … I’ll be plugging it in to all my blogs … I get soooooo much spam!
Thanks, this is a good one!
This plugin contains an awful amount of code execution in terms of the trade off of throwing it straight into the comments template of your theme. I’m big on Wordpress optimization and for the average or advanced user this plugin is not practical. A good idea for those who are newer to wordpress. Chances are though, if you are new to wordpress you dont know the code as well anyways.
On heavily trafficed wordpress sites, this is one I’d get rid of the cut corners. Or make very sure I had supercache running since its a non-dynamic addin.
Either way, always nice to have more options in the growing wordpress plugin community.
@ Rob – Thanks for the feedback. As mentioned, if you know HTML you can just manually do it anyways. It is indeed meant for newbies, advanced users can perhaps just borrow the concept and hardcode their own policies directly. We’ll try to reduce the amount of code in the next version, while keeping the user experience.
Hi Gobala,
you always come up with some good stuff. Thanks.
Erg. I just tried to turn it on at http://www.womens-business-gallery.com and got the following error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /homepages/17/d221805378/htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/comments-policy/metabox.class.php on line 16
Any suggestions?
Good job Gopala !
Hey Carma, I just got the exact same error on my new video games blog at http://www.cheatcodesplus.com … I’m running WP 2.8.2 – is that the same version you’re using? I’m having a look at the code now, so if I figure out a solution, I’ll post it here.
Thank you very much for the plugin!
Hi Carma , Mark
It seem you’re using the old version of PHP. You require at least PHP 5.2 and higher. By the way.. I already fix this issue in Comments Policy 1.1. You can use Comments Policy except import/export features.
This is definitely going to curb some spam on my blog. I was seeing a lot of the comments getting eaten by Askimset.
This is definitely going to make my life easy as I get at least 100+ spam comments from folks promoting their so called cheap drug offers and other adult content offers. Thanks for this plugin!
tancks.
This Post Helped me
Good Time
Gobala:
Thank you for the comment policy plugin you offered to your list a few days ago.
I am running Wordpress version 2.6.1
Comment Policy ver1.1
Help your readers to self-moderate their comments by displaying a clear Comments Policy.
When I installed this plugin, I am getting this error message:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: screen_icon() in /homepages/29/d171141693/htdocs/mydomainame/wp-content/plugins/comments-policy/metabox.class.php on line 77
Do you know what’s wrong or do you have an updated version of your plugin?
I hate spam too, but don’t forget that commenting on others blog is most important thing for a blogger, you get Traffic from it, you get backlink from it, you get new friends from it
Gonna look this one up and see if I can auto install it. If not, I’ll be coming back to download. Thanks.