I bet the answer for most of you is either the Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin or Disqus/IntenseDebate.

They may work just fine, however, when I launched this blog I was not aware of the later 2, so I was looking for something more up to date and found Comment Notifier.

Comment Notifier WordPress plugin review

The plugin was developed by Satollo who also wrote Hyper Cache and many other great plugins.
It is easy to configure and has straight forward features. In this review I will mention some of them:

  1. Remove this email: allows removal of any email from the subscription list. This person will no longer receive updates on new comments for any of the posts (as opposed to step 11 that allows removal of email post by post).
  2. Auto add the checkbox: you want this one to be checked, because naturally you would like to have a checkbox below your comments (like in this box) allowing the user to subscribe to comments. However, in case your theme does not have the following call in the comments.php file <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> , you can either add this call or enter the input fields manually.
  3. Subscription checkbox label: the text that will be displayed next to that checkbox.

  1. Notification message body and using tags: this is the core of the plugin. Here you specify what would be written in the mail notification that the commentator receives once a new comment is added.
    There are various tags to be used, such as the author (commentator’s name), the comment itself, an unsubscribe link and even extra features like related posts and ads.
  2. Comment excerpt length: in case you don’t want the comment to be displayed as a whole in the notification, you can limit the number of characters in it (for example, type ’30′).

  1. Unsubscription page URL: here you can type the URL of a page that will be displayed once the user clicks the unsubscribe link in their notification. I personally do not use this feature at the moment, but in case you do want to use it, all you have to do is create a page in your blog, type whatever text you wish that confirms that the user has unsubscribed successfully, and copy this page’s permalink to this box.
  2. Unsubscription message: enter the text to be displayed after the user clicks the unsubscribe link. If you didn’t specify a page URL in the previous step, the text you type here will be displayed on a blank page and the user will be automatically redirected to your homepage 3 seconds afterwards.
  3. Thank you message settings: this section is a plugin within a plugin. You can send customized messages to first time commentators in your blog.
  4. Save and send a thank you test email: both this button and the one above it are very useful, because instead of doing tedious testing in your blog’s test environment, you can simply click this button (but only after you entered an email address in step 10), and you’ll receive the customized notification.

  1. Email address where to send test emails: important for testing purposes. You can test all the above features by entering an email address here.
  2. Long list of subscribers: here you see a list of all emails addresses of readers that subscribed to comments, organized by post name. You can check one or more of these addresses and remove them from the subscription list.

Note: large text areas were resized to smaller ones in the images above, in order to reduce image size.

So which plugin do you use for comment subscriptions? Are you satisfied with it? Does it have the same features as this one?

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