In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the news of the week including, the removal of offensive lyrics in Hello Dolly, a request for plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions, and changes coming in WordPress 4.9.5. We also talk about community management, the difference between comments (more…)
Out-of-the-box, WordPress provides the ability to blacklist comments or configure a set of options to send comments to moderation. If all comments are moderated, there are no options to whitelist comments. Searching the plugin directory for comment whitelisting provides few, if any, solutions. However, a cursory search of Google led (more…)
Disqus, a comment management and hosting service, has announced it suffered a data breach that affects 17.5 million users. A snapshot of its database from 2012 with information dating back to 2007 containing email addresses, usernames, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain-text were exposed. Passwords hashed with the (more…)
Every now and then, I’ll come across a user experience in WordPress that makes me scratch my head. Earlier today, I needed to edit a comment’s details before restoring it from the Trash. However, WordPress doesn’t allow this without restoring it first. After restoring the comment, it disappeared from the (more…)
Over the years, I’ve received requests from people wanting their comments removed from the site. I recently received a request from a reader that I remove a comment they made three years ago because it was showing up in Google search results for their name. Normally, I ignore these requests (more…)
Earlier this year, NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, open sourced its comment quiz plugin for WordPress. The site’s publishers have been experimenting with requiring their readers to complete a short, three-question quiz before giving access to the comment form on certain articles. The goal of the (more…)
When we interviewed Daniel Ha, CEO and co-founder of Disqus, earlier this year, he explained why some users were reporting problems syncing comments between Disqus and WordPress and that improvements would be coming soon. “We may have taken some services offline to work on them which may have affected those who were (more…)
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Daniel Ha, CEO and co-founder of Disqus. Ha explains why he created the service, what his thoughts are on large sites disabling comments, and the state of comments on the web. We also discuss the company’s monetization strategies and what (more…)
NRKbeta, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s media and technology site, is experimenting with a new way of keeping comments on topic. A new plugin on the WordPress-powered site aims to ensure commenters have read the article by requiring them to complete a short, three-question quiz before opening the comment form. Visitors (more…)
Online harassment is a hot topic right now, as Twitter’s perennial battle with trolls heats up, forcing the company to develop new features to combat abuse. Technology companies are scrambling to create solutions that will make their communities safer for users and now Google is taking on the challenge of (more…)
When Disqus announced it would be releasing new, subscription-based versions later this year, users didn’t expect to have the new advertising model injected into their sites without notice. Disqus CEO Daniel Ha said the company would release finalized pricing and provide more details well in advance of its planned March (more…)
One of my favorite features in WordPress is the ability to easily embed content from services such as YouTube by copying and pasting the source URL into the post editor. The feature is called oEmbed and was added seven years ago to WordPress 2.9. While content authors enjoy the luxury (more…)