Comment Hacks

Comment Hacks is a simple plugin that means to make your life using the WordPress comments system easier and more fun! This plugin currently has 5 modules, all of which were previously separate plugins, that I’ll explain briefly here:

Minimum comment length

By default, a comment of even 1 character is long enough to be saved. I think that’s weird. If someone wants to leave a comment, I’d prefer it if they have something real to say. This module allows you to set a minimum length and prevent people from leaving a comment if they’re under that.

Email commenters

Sometimes you want to email a commenter directly, or you want to email everyone who commented on a post. This module adds an email link in the admin, when you hover over a comment, and an email all commenters button in the WP Toolbar on a post page. See what that looks like:

Comment redirect

One of our “old time classics”, this module allows you to redirect first time commenters to a thank you page. You can use this page to inform them about other nice things on your site, stuff they should really read, etc. Want to see how that works?

Comment parent edit

When you’re editing a comment in the backend of WordPress, you can’t change the parent comment, which is sometimes annoying when people reply to the wrong person. The plugin adds a simple input field to change that:

Clean notification emails

This module does one “simple” thing: make comment emails look better! See this example:

Clean notification emails were originally part of a plugin built by Mike Davidson. The plugin which inspired us for this was built and released by Mike Davidson in 2008. Mike had since moved on, so I emailed him a while back, when I was still at Yoast, asking if it was ok for me to update his old plugin. He gave his OK so I went to work on his old code and brought it forward. When I left Yoast we decided after a while that it would be better if I took the development of this plugin with me, and moved it from Yoast to here.

Get the plugin

Want to get the plugin? Search for comment hacks in your WP admin or download the plugin from WordPress.org!