Comment Tools Pro gives WordPress site owners settings for comment links, moderation, and reader participation. Site owners choose which controls to enable, while commenters can add media, subscribe, vote, and follow discussion activity.

Comment links and moderation rules

Remove the website field from the comment form, unlink commenter names, prevent URLs from becoming clickable, or remove HTML link tags. URLs remain visible as text when hyperlinking is disabled. Comment links can also open in a new tab, with rel values of UGC, follow, or nofollow.

Site owners can disable comments globally or conceal existing comments. Bulk actions delete pending comments, all comments, or spam comments. Users with the required privileges can delete comments or mark them as spam from the front end. A separate option shows a post's update date.

Incoming comment rules can set a minimum interval between comments from the same visitor, minimum and maximum comment lengths with custom alert messages, and keyword or phrase checks that mark comments as spam or delete them. A bot check adds a stylesheet or picture to the page and checks for a cookie when a comment is submitted; submissions without the cookie can be marked as spam.

Sentiment review and comment threads

Sentiment and emotion analysis is available for English comments. Site owners can show sentiment icons, filter comments as positive, negative, or neutral, and set a threshold to automatically prevent comments with profanity or too many negative words. The commenter sees a warning and can be asked to rephrase the comment.

Readers can upvote or downvote comments, quote another comment, and mention a username with an @name tag. Mention suggestions can populate as the commenter types, and the mentioned user can receive a notification. Comment replies can be collapsed with a comment count, and comments can include a read more option. Site owners can pin a comment or mark it private so only the administrator and commenter can see it.

Reader uploads and notifications

Commenters can record voice messages or attach images, videos, audio, documents, and other files. Site owners can restrict file types, set a maximum upload size, require an attachment, choose whether uploads are available to all customers or logged-in users, and moderate comments with attachments. Attachment settings control whether files are embedded or shown as links, and whether uploads can be multiple files or grouped into an image gallery. Links to services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter can be embedded automatically in comment text.

Site owners can email an individual commenter, notify a commenter when a comment is approved, and send reminders or notifications about new comments. Options include notifying commenters on a post when it receives a new comment, or notifying all site users about a new comment on any post.

Subscriptions, exports, and integrations

Commenters can opt in to a newsletter while leaving a comment. Site owners can edit the subscription prompt, view the subscriber list, and export subscriber names and email addresses as a CSV file. Commenter email addresses can also be exported. MailChimp integration can add subscribers to a mailing list, and Zapier can pass subscriber information to connected mailing platforms.

AI replies

To enable automatic replies, add an OpenAI API key in the comment tools settings. The extension can reply to approved comments, with an option to respond only to top-level comments or to child comments as well. Reply settings control length, temperature, verbosity, presence penalty, and frequency penalty.

Set up the comment tools

1. Install and activate Comment Tools Pro on a WordPress site with comments enabled.
2. Open the comment tools settings and choose the link, moderation, interaction, and notification options for the site.
3. For AI replies, add an OpenAI API key and select which approved comments can receive automatic responses.
4. Review the comment area and adjust the selected settings to fit the site's discussion process.