30+ Plugins for Wordpress Comments

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When working on a WordPress blog, posts often take center stage. However, the comments are often just as important - they create valuable discussion. And yet the default WordPress comment box is simplistic and uninspiring - here are Mashable's favorite comment-focused WordPress plugins that can eliminate spam, improve the appearance of comments, and add more value to your posts.

Fight Spam

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Akismet - Antispam plugin from the creators of Wordpress that uses a central database of spam comments to flag spam. Requires a free API key from Wordpress.com

Spam Karma - Analyzes comments for spam based on a karma system.

Bad Behavior - Prevents spambots from even accessing your site by analyzing their HTTP requests.

Did You Pass Math? - Asks commenters a simple math question before their comments are posted.

Comment Timeout - Closes comments on old posts.

Encourage Commenting

BlogFollow - Shows a snippet of the commenter's blog at the bottom of the comment.

DoFollow - Removes "nofollow" attributes from links in comments so search engines can follow them.

DoFollow Trackbacks - Removes "nofollow" attributes from trackbacks

Show Top Commentators - Lists the most frequent commentators on your blog, along with links to their blogs, in your sidebar.

Improve appearance

Nicer Trackbacks - Improves the appearance of trackbacks from other blogs.

WP-NoSh*t - Filters bad words from comments.

Numbered Comments Adds numbers to comments.

AuthorHighlight - Highlights comments by the blog's author.

Comment Highlighter - Styles comments based on the author's name, email, or URL.

wp-chunk - Truncates long URLs in comments to prevent them from stretching the page.

Enable rich comments

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Custom Smileys - Adds clickable smiley emoticons to comments.

TinyMCEComments - Turns the comment box into a full-featured rich text editor.

Live Comment Preview - Allows readers to preview their comment before posting.

Edit Comments XT - Lets commentators edit their own comments.

Enable avatars

Gravatar - Displays user-selected avatars from a central database next to comments.

Favatars - Pulls the favicon from a commenter's blog or website, and uses that for their avatar.

MBLA - Adds user images from MyBlogLog to comments.

OpenID Comments - Lets readers comment with their OpenID identity.

Show off comments

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WP-Most Commented Posts - Displays posts with the most comments in the sidebar.

Latest Comments with Avatars Reloaded - Shows the latest comments, along with the MyBlogLog avatars of the commenters.

Allow better conversation

Simple CoComments - Tracks the conversation across blogs.

Comment Karma - Digg-style voting on comments.

Quoter - Allows users to quote a previous comment in their comment.

Whisper - Lets users "whisper" comments that are only visible to one person.

Moderate comments effectively

Comment Twitter SMS Notification - Notifies you of new comments through Twitter SMS.

Bannage - Adds the ability to ban users from commenting by name, email, or IP.

CommentCentral - Allows batch opening and closing of comments on multiple posts.