Rating The Comments With Comment Karma
written by John Chow
If you have a really sharp eye, you would have noticed that I installed a new Wordpress Plugin, call Comment Karma, that allows you to rate the comments of other commentators. If you look at the comments of each writer, you’ll see a thumbs up and thumbs down icon next to their name.
- Pressing thumbs up gives +1 Karma
- Pressing thumbs down gives -1 Karma
The Plugin keeps a running count of the karma the comment receives. I installed this Plugin to allow commentators to get an idea on what readers think about their comments. Make a good comment and you should get lots of positive karma. Make a spam comment and watch your karma go into the negative.
The Plugin is the work of Alex Bailey of Tech Reads. Installation is a little more involved - you need to enter your database information - than most Wordpress Plugins but it is still very straightforward.
Unfortunately, the Plugin doesn’t offer any stats. There is no way to tell who has the most karma on their comments. It would have been really cool if Bailey added a leader board feature like the Top Commentator Plugin.
To test the new Plugin I invite all readers to make a comment and rate the other comments on this blog. Let’s see who can get the highest karma score. Enjoy!
Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Here's A Few More Related Posts
I have been “lurking” around, reading your blog for
a while now. I guess this really is the perfect post to start commenting on
I love your blog, and I learned a lot since I started reading it. Now I’m addicted !
John Chow is a sexy god who will one day take over the internet for his own! His site will not be the best site on the net anymore, it will be the ONLY site! But would you need to visit another one? No!!
That’s got to be good karma!!
Kumiko
xo
I’ve been “lurking” on your blog for quite a while now, and I’m addicted ! I’ve learned a lot from it and I love it.
I guess this post is the perfect post for my first comment.
Keep up the good work
Honestly John your opinion matters. I like the plugin as well and I thought about installing it but I since it doesn’t have the stats, it’s not worth much to me. I’m sure Mr. Bailey will add stats in another version.
My site: http://www.berrybusyblog.com
I think you should have a little page or popup or something that says, “Your comment has been posted by is awaiting moderation!” or something similar because I have been seeing an influx of duplicate comments lately.
Ya, I wish Akismet would do that. Maybe the coding genius Justin can help with this…
I thought there was a message on the page (right after you post a comment) that says “Your comment is awaiting moderation”… Maybe you just need to make it more noticeable - bold, red text…?
Everyone who types in the URL of their site in every comment will get a thumbs-down from me!
Same here. Thumbs down on all the URL self promoters & “Me too” comments. (oops)
I agree. But I do have to admit, when I first started blogging last year I had no clue on blogging or commentator etiquette. So I was the one leaving the URL.
I remember it vividly, I left a comment on Digg, yes DIGG of all places, with my URL (at the time was Rich Dad Says). You should have seen the emails I got…”Get the F&*#k out of here you spammers!!!” Wern’t very nice…but guess what, I LEARNED MY LESSON.
For the new bloggers out there…DO NOT LEAVE YOUR URL IN THE COMMENT… just a piece of advice
My dog is named Karma. He is a good dog. Does that mean it’s good karma?
When you call him it’s a good Karma I think.
I think people are digging each other down, simply because they can.
Digg me down bitches!
When you call him a name it’s a good karma I guess.
Interesting plugin John, I’ve seen it at ShoeMoney once and it seemed to work pretty well.
However, I keep getting an error when I click the thumbs up, a JS dialog pops up stating ‘Error: Try Again Later’, it does work on some though, I was able to rate Nate W., but not Carl…
I don’t get it. What happens if you get bad karma? If all it does is update a score next to the comment then … who cares?
From what I understand… People with bad Comment Karma get their own blogs spammed with bad comments and possibly get reincarnated as cockroaches.
thanks for that information, john. i learned a lot from your site. keep up the good works!
Hmmm people are being quite random with their scores, I hope you guys are just testing
I guess a feature like this helps to make people think about what they’re going to write, but I wouldn’t take the concept too far. A leaderboard of top commentators is a good idea, but a board showing the most unpopular users might make people think twice about posting quick replies - killing off the conversational feel to the current system.
Also (I’m not finished!) I think the presentation of the plugin isn’t great - i.e. the little text –2 is a little uninspiring. In fact I think it adds very little to the site without a leaderboard function as there is no driver for people to actually use it (and no way for you to make a competition out of it!).
hehe, this is not good for my comments i think
I think you’re cool Mr John Chow. A living proof that anyone can make it happen as long as you do it!
I don’t want to be judged…
Again another plugin to increase the interaction with the readers of this blog.
Good work, john!
Great plugin but as previously mentioned some of the scores seem pretty random.
Is there any vote limitation? If there isn’t then a person with bad karma could, quite ironically, spam their way out of it with a huge number of positive votes.
All in all though, this plugin, polished up a little, in conjunction with the leaderboard would be a very significant addition to any blog. I think I’ll let you guys do all the polishing first though
My bad. A simple test would have shown me that there is a one vote limit per comment and that it prevents you from voting on your own. Still looking forward to a tie in with the leaderboard though.
As a dedicated JC fan I post this comment from my laptop while driving in my car.
Anyway its funny you introduce this comment now because I was digging through your code last night to see what sort of goodies I can find, so downloaded and installed this plugin last night. I just didn’t get a chance to upload it to the site. Way to stay a step ahead even when I’m using guerilla tactics! =)
Why do negative scores have multiple negative signs? Does this mean they’re actually positive?
Is there anything happen if the commentor has a lot of negative karma?
Ok, ban.
Hahaha…do you really want to start that conversation
Ryan, if you check out the plugin’s homepage they talk about the reason in the comments. It’s just a coding thing and may be changed. Remember, two wrongs don’t make a right =)
Very true, two wrongs don’t make a right.
I see the comment in the plugin post, and I’m not sure what crack pipe the author was hitting but a –# does not in any way relate to decrementing a variable!
Maybe he could have been more creative and did something like: “Name– x (number of negatives)” or “Name++ x (number of positives)”
That would at least make sense.
Hey John,
I was looking through the wordpress database the other day and noticed there is a column called comments_karma in cp_comments. So perhaps this feature was built in but not implemented. If that is the case, you could display the top 10 karma comments pretty easily with a mysql select:
SELECT *
FROM cp_comments c
WHERE cp_comment_post_ID = $somepostid
ORDER BY cp_comment_karma DESC
LIMIT 10
http://www.jonlee.ca
Seems like a nice plugin, will install it on my own blog. Thanks John!
John, I was wondering what you were going to implement to deal with comment whoring to get on your top 10 list and it seems this plugin (if you can implement a leaderboard) would be an excellent replacement to the top commentators listing.
This is a good plugin, but with a bad method. I see people doing thumbs down on very good comments. It should have some kind of control to avoid this. But overall, this plugin rocks
I hope the Digg mob doesn’t find out about this
Talk about a way to lure in commenters!
I’ve been reading your blog for some time and I’ve found it extremely useful. I’ve discovered so many great Wordpress plug-ins from your site.
I’ll be definitely trying the karma plugin on my nascent site.
Do you have any other plugins you are considering implementing?
Excellent addition!
Wow, I see some negative 17’s and 11’s! This should keep all the spammers or meaningless comments to a minimum. Great feature John, it would be great if there was a way to have the stats to a plug in like this. I’m sure there will be one soon.
Anyone have an idea how to arrange the comments based on the comment Karma points? It would be nice to allow the good commenters top placement in the comments as opposed to purely time-based. Or another option that would be great would be to gray out comments that have significant negative points similar to what digg.com uses.
I’ve tried using this one before. But I couldn’t get it working with Threaded comments.
It made me think twice before I post any feedback and this one may be the last.
Too bad it doesn’t keep any long-term statistics though, you’d be getting a lot less spamming from people who are trying to be top commentators, so even if they do comment massively, they will at least bother to add something productive to the conversation.
Allen.H
Interesting plug-in… but I’m not sure if this gives accurate stats of the value of comments - at least I’m seeing more negative rankings than positive on this post. But people might just be testing this and decided to test the red thumb
Or it might just be because the John Chow readers are too competitive
There sure are a lot of people in the negative.
People?NO!
Comment popularity. Must we go high school with every blog element? (:
I noticed that someone posted the above code to show off the top 10 karma posters.
You could easily pull the amount of karma as well. Depending on how the query is run in PHP it could be similar to something like this:
$strqry= “SELECT * FROM cp_comments WHERE cp_comments_post_ID = ‘{$somepostid}’ ORDER BY cp_comment_karma DESC LIMIT 10″;
$qry = mysql_query($strqry) or die(”MySQL Error: {$strqry}”. mysql_error());
echo “Top 10 Karma Whores”;
while($karma = mysql_fetch_array($qry)) {
echo “{$karma['whatever_field_is_commentors_name']} ({$karma['cp_comment_karma']} “;
}
Anywho gives ya a rough idea…
Thats a pretty cool function… I think Im going to have to add that little function to my website… http://www.michaelmckinlay.com
The internet just gets more and more amazing!
[...] - I’ve turn off the Comment Karma and the Challenge Question [...]