How To – Thank Commenters & Reduce Duplicate Comments On Your WordPress Blog
About 6 or 7 months ago, I had a problem on this blog. I was getting a lot of great comments, but I was getting twice as many as I was supposed to. The reason? People were getting confused with my comment form. Their comment was either showing with a “your comment is in moderation”, or not showing the comment at all, giving the impression their comment wasn’t received. How can you stop this?
One way is to send the commenter to a separate page on leaving the comment. This should leave them in no doubt that they have left a comment, and also gives them a few ideas on where to go next. How do you do this in WordPress?
Step 1 – Create A Thank You Page For The Comment
Open up the administration panel of your WordPress installation, and visit Pages > Add New. It’s a great idea for the page to be called something that is unambiguous (such as “Thank You For Your Comment”), with a short explanation on why their comment isn’t showing (that it is held in the moderation queue).
Furthermore you can also use the page to promote some of your other wares. On my thank you page I have a link to my newsletter and my twitter feed. But you can put whatever you want on there.
Step 2 – Install Comment Redirect
We will be using a WordPress plugin called Comment Redirect, what this plugin does is that it redirects first time commenters to a separate page on your blog (this is important, your previous commenters won’t be bombarded with stuff they already know). Download it, unzip it & install it to the plugins directory on the wp-content (or do a search for it on the Add New menu on the Plugins site.
Step 3 – Set up the comment redirect so that it looks at the Page Created in Step 1
Before the plugin becomes useful though, you need to set it up. To do this, click on Plugins > Comment Redirect, and you should see a screen that looks similar to this:-
Select the page you created in Step 1 from the drop down box, then press “Save Settings”, to save the settings.
And that’s it! Hopefully you should see traffic pickup on that page, which shows that it’s working. If it’s effectively written, instead of leaving your site, you should get a number of new commenters checking out your other areas of your site, not just that one post.
However, the other bonus is that you’ll save yourself time. Instead of moderating two or three comments, you now moderate one or two at absolute most.
Tags: Blogging, commenters, How To, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugins | Comments: 5 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
I use this method and it works great.
However, comment redirect works only for first time commentators. Many times, comments of even regular comments are marked spam. I use Ajax Edit Comments to display a custom message when comment is marked as spam. This can also help!
Comment redirect is good method. I wonder if there is any .htaccess method for it as I am reluctant to use many plugins
I am commenting now. Let see how Comment Redirect look like.
I saw your interview over on RobsWebTips and thus came over here!
Great idea about the comments; I’ve never tried anything like that, but am definately going to implement it in my blog. Just to confirm, do you think it’s a good idea to put links to other pages in my blog that I want to drive traffic to on the ‘thanks’ page? Thanks!