Readers have often mentioned that they wished our comment box had a ‘preview’ feature, so I went poking around in the WordPress Plugins Directory and found one. It is a ‘live-preview’ plugin, which means the formatted text is displayed in a box below the comment, and is updated as the user types. There are others out there if this one doesn’t give satisfactory results, but some of them will require that I upgrade to the newest version of WordPress (which is something I’ve been meaning to do anyway, as I’m still running version 2.21, and the latest is 2.7).
I’ve also added a ‘subscribe-to-comments’ plugin, which lets users request email notifications of new comments on any thread they are participating in, and a plugin that makes it easier to embed images.
What I’d really like to be able to do would be to get rid of that little spam-blocking ‘captcha’ box that forces unregistered users to enter digits from a displayed image. It appears that I still need it, though: I turned it off for all of about thirty seconds while I was installing the new ones this evening, and even in that brief interval I received an enormous comment full of unsavory links.
Let me know if this preview plugin seems acceptable, or if you think I should keep looking.
6 Comments
Looks like an improvement to me. I like the instant preview.
Thus far it seems to be working. You’ve gotten rid of the “spam comments” pretty good. About 99.9% of my comments seem to go by the wayside.
Just as well, you ignore me and vice versical.
I guess we can forget arguing about Coca-Cola International, and the “Thai Tubbies”, Court.
Nice feature.
Have you tried akismet or spam karma 2? I use them (my kid installed them) and they catch everything! I hate the captcha thingy, as my eyesight is failing along with everything else.
Thanks, Sister. I hate the captcha thing too. I’ll give Akismet a try, if you think it really works.
Belated thanks for the addition. Nice feature!