Blog comments are a double edged sword. Without them your blog feels like a deserted town, tumbleweeds blowing in the wind. With them you feel the pressure to respond, without really knowing if your response is ever being read. If only there was some way to email your response as well as posting it on your blog. Look no further, because there is.
A crack team of Japanese scientists have been training orphans in secret for generations, showing them the hidden techniques of comment posting and email delivery. The Comment Ninja hides in the shadows of your web browser, awaiting your orders. He only appears on the WordPress Edit Comments dashboard. Type your response inside the WordPress dashboard and Comment Ninja will do all the work of sending it in the background: posting the comment to your blog, or sending the comment by email (or both) while you keep commenting.
WordPress Comment Ninja is not a WordPress plugin. It is a script for the Firefox web browser that will work with any installation of WordPress or WordPress Multi-user — that means you can use it with WordPress.com, Edublogs.org, Blogsome.com and any site that is running WordPress where you have access to the Edit Comments dashboard. It also means that you can install it once in your web browser and it will work with all WordPress blogs you have administrator access to.
How To Install
- You need the Firefox web browser - Download and install
- You need to install Greasemonkey - How-To
- You need to know how to install a Greasemonkey script - How-To
- Install WordPress Comment Ninja
Comment Ninja has one configuration option: should it use your browser default for sending emails (by treating them as mailto: links) or should it send emails using Gmail. The Gmail option is much faster, but you have to be logged in to Gmail to use it.
What Would Comment Ninja Do?
- Respond directly from the edit comment administration panel on your dashboard
- Respond by comment, email or both (without having to cut-and-paste your response!)
- Respond using your email program of choice — or send it ultra-fast with Gmail
- Automatically refers back to the original comment
- No plug-in required, just the Firefox web browser and the Greasemonkey extension (free!)
- Works with an WordPress or WordPress Multi-user blog
- This will work with WordPress.com, Edublogs, Blogsome, etc
- Comment Ninja respects your privacy
- Automatically updates itself to the latest version every 2 weeks
WordPress Comment Ninja in Action
Getting Started
First time users can try posting a comment to their own blog, or sending a test email to see for themselves how Comment Ninja works.
Send a Response
From your Edit Comments administration dashboard you can respond to comments and post your response as a comment, or by email or by both.
Responded with a Comment
Responded with an Email
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: I notice Comment Ninja has a big sword. Will Comment Ninja help me butter my delicious toast?
No sir, he won’t. Comment Ninja is an anthropomorphism of a piece of software.
Q2: I can send emails but I can’t sent comment responses! What’s going on?!
Comment Ninja doesn’t use any black magic to post a comment. It sends a comment response as if you typed in the response yourself. But it might not recognize your blog theme. Please send me a comment (and include your blog url!!!) and I’ll test it for myself.
The usual culprit is blog captcha schemes to prevent spammers. You should probably disable them for when you are logged in as an administrator.
Q3: I’m a strong believer in the benefits of wearing a tin foil hat. Can you tell me more about how Comment Ninja respects my privacy?
- Comment Ninja only speaks Japanese, so there is no chance of him snooping on the contents of your responses
- Because Comment Ninja runs in your web browser it doesn’t need to know your username/password for your blog or your email program — if you’re already logged in then it just works
- Emails are sent using *your* email program settings — the CC and BCC fields are left empty, and it will use the same signature you always use
- You can see all of the emails you have sent in your Send Items folder
- It does not load any images from other websites. All images are embedded in the script so it does not have any way of tracking you
- Once every two weeks it checks for an updated version on userscripts.org, a public website for hosting Greasemonkey scripts that I have no special privileges on, and you are prompted to confirm if you want to accept the update
- There is a link to this page at the bottom of every email so people can find out about the script if they’re interested in it (as can be seen in the screenshots)
Q4: Is Comment Ninja related to any of the other ninja delivery services a la Snow Crash?
Q5: That wee ninja is so cute! Where can I get one?
You can buy a wee ninja at Shawnimals. Also look out for the Ninjatown game they are building.
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65 Comments
Nicely done. I like the script, but you should mention that you have to click “Respond” under the comment you wish to respond to, next to “Unapprove” and “Spam”. It took me a few minutes to figure that out. Other than that, I think its great and works prefectly.
@megavoltage:
Yup, I plan to do some more screenshots soon. I’m still working on documenting it, but it had been stable for a while so I figured it was time to get feedback from other people.
@megavoltage:
Maybe I should put an icon on the respond button?
2007/09/15 - 0.2
- Added icon to the respond link
- Fixed up includes to avoid other comment pages like mass edit mode or moderation
- Fixed problem with trying to run it without Firebug installed
I’ll give this a try. Does it only work for webmail or for POP?
[I would dearly love something that would post to WordPress.com through Eudora and my GMail account.
All the basic html formatting I can do in Eudora and Eudora works off-line. Just about everything drags and drops or copy and pastes to it and bestest-- no javascript.]
@mpb:
It works with anything and everything. It sends the email using a web standard mailto — so if you can configure Firefox to open mailto links in Eudora then you can send mail from Eudora.
I use it with Gmail, and it works great for that. I even put in a special fast Gmail mode that uses the Gmail mobile for cellphones.
For some reason it is setting the subject of my emails as the commentors email address. Am I doing something wrong, shouldn’t the subject be the title of the post?
@elysa:
Yup, there was a definite bug there. Thanks for reporting it.
Please update to fix it.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/12239.user.js
There might be another bug with the script finding the link to the post. I’m investigating.
Oh, man, you did it again! This is a great script. It really makes keeping the conversation going very smooth.
Keep up the good work.
@Jason:
Glad you like it!
Yeah, it does make commenting so much less of a hassle. I can blow through my unanswered comments in a few minutes now. I no longer wonder if people are reading my answers because I can email the answers as well as responding to them on the blog.
seems like your download link isn’t working. is there another place i can download it?
Hmm, there’s a definite bug with putting a link at the end of a response.
@The Foo:
It looks like userscripts.org is down at the moment. Try this link:
http://internet-duct-tape.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/greasemonkey/wordpresscommentninja.user.js
You might want to hold off 24 hours. I plan to push out an update today.
thanks for the link. i’ll wait 24 hours for the new update.
i just installed your script, i see in my comments dashboard that the script has been installed successfully but i don’t see any “reply” or “forward” anywhere under the comments. btw: i did change the settings to my default browser email.
@The Foo:
You should see a “respond” button in between Unapprove and Spam on your Comment Administration panel in your dashboard. /wp-admin/edit-comments.php
nope not seeing that, in my /wp-admin/edit-comments.php … i just see
Edit Comment | Delete Comment | Edit Post “POST NAME” | View Post
under the comment. I am using WP 2.03 — is that something to do with it?
@The Foo:
Yeah, looks like the script is not finding the correct spot for injecting the respond link in 2.03
In newer versions it looks like:
[ Edit | Delete | Unapprove | Approve | Spam ]
I’ll see what I can do about supporting any version. Shouldn’t be hard.
2007/09/25 - 0.4
- Wait a bit before sending the comment, might fix problem with comments being blocked
- BUGFIX: Respond link didn’t display for guest bloggers who weren’t full admins
- maybe BUGFIX: Respond link doesn’t display on older versions of WordPress (specifically 2.03)
- potentional BUG: If last line of respond comment is a link then post comment loads that instead of comment page?
Can’t reproduce it right now.
Seems I can’t use Comment Ninja right now, ever since I installed version 0.4.
@Raphy:
Do you still see Comment Ninja working on /wp-admin/edit-comments.php ? Are emails still sent, just not blog comments?
Is there any chance you changed your blog theme to Digg 3 at around the same time?
No I don’t see it on /wp-admin/edit-comments.php, but I actually have changed my blog’s theme to the Digg theme a few days ago.
@Raphy:
It’s not the Digg 3 theme. I just tested it out and Comment Ninja still works with it.
Alright well at least I still have a copy of the 0.3 version, I’ll just use that for now. Thanks anyway.
@Raphy:
Is 0.3 still working for you? I wonder what broke in 0.4.
It would be nice if you include previous versions here on your site in case the same thing that happened to me happens to someone else.
bug: gmail mobile and compose mode die on this comment for some reason. Need to read the mailto spec again.
—
The linkee doesn’t get the same thing out of it as a regular blog post because it isn’t really part of the conversation (although you have 120-140 characters to describe a link in delicious).
But I find that link lists can be a GREAT resource for finding interesting stuff. Surprisingly stuff I’ve linked to in my Best of Feeds has gotten mentioned on lifehacker.com 3 times now.
The way I see it is there are two extremes: write a blog post about every individual link that is just a summary or do a ‘interesting link round-up’ style every week or so. I know I’m more likely to regularly read a blog that does the later vs a blog that does the former. If all a blog does is secondary source information with no original posts then why read it when you can read the original sources?
(of course, some people are REALLY GOOD at being a secondary source for interesting things… boingboing, etc… and every niche has room for a few good blogs that secondary source stuff… and some add great commentary)
I have a whole wackload of tumbleblogs I ‘loosely’ follow by people like zenhabits.net and skelliewag.org that have been great sources of information even though they have 0 original content.
@Raphy:
I’d rather figure out why it isn’t working :)
I’m still thinking it’s a Vista thing because I’ve never used it with Vista.
ok, found out why the bug 2 comments up was happening. It’s due to the blog title in the subject line.
blog-tip-3-second-link-post-quick
Gets converted to tip%203%20second which doesn’t get transfered properly.
Just tried this and I’m jumping out of my skin with excitement. Some issues, though. First, how do I blog to the “group” of comments, not a specific commenter? I really don’t want the @name link in the comment form as often I’m responding to multiple comments, not just one. Since it only appears after the comment has posted, can I set this to turn on or off before it posts?
Also, each time I tried it, I found a tab opened up to the post at the end of my tabs. Why? If I don’t need to “see” the post or the comment, why should it waste bandwidth by opening the post in a new tab?
This is tiny stuff. I’m loving this, my friend. Truly brilliant.
Another thing, Ninja doesn’t “engage” after editing a comment and returning to the comment panel, nor when the View Mode is clicked ( /wp-admin/edit-comments.php?mode=view ). It needs to activate after each of these.
@Lorelle VanFossen:
For responding to a group of commenters, it probably is best just to post on the page. My goal was to promote one-on-one interaction with commenters and reaching out to the via email… so it might not be the best tool in the world for someone who gets as many comments as you do. (I’m lucky if I get 50 a week)
Opening a new tab is how it posts comments without incurring the wrath of the anti-spam gods :). I was a little worried about trying to do it all under the covers if someone is using captcha, or any of those other silly things. But I should keep hacking at it and see if I can come up with something better…
because it’s a web browser extension I don’t have the luxury of being able to inject comments directly in the DB.
Nagger that I am, I just noticed that this comes up in the Blog Herald’s comments panel. WEEEEEE! And other WordPress blog comment panels. DOUBLE WEEEE!
Is there a way to put in a user level thingie so that multiple bloggers on a blog could get “their blog post comments” highlighted to stand out from the other blogger’s comments?
Typically, a multi-blogger blog’s will only show the Spam and Delete links if they are have authorization. If they don’t, then those links are gone from those comments. That would be a clue - to frame or colorize comments that have the Spam and Delete links, with a conditional statement that would check for multiple authors…hmmm, now it’s getting more complicated. Not sure, but I sure with colorizing authorized post comments was built into WordPress.
Ah, darn. See, is the bandwidth wasting that I want to get rid of. And less tabs. So it means that I would have to post the comment, then flip around with the tabs and close those. Hmmm. Dang. I knew it was too good to be true.
There are many weeks when I don’t even get 50 comments - so quit bragging!
This is very interesting. Are there any phone home issues? Do our responses get sent back here to your site — or anywhere else — for reading or interpreting or for bug analysis?
If think it’s important for any sophisticated script that users are cautioned about any invisible backend processing that might be happening and — if nothing is getting sent home — that should be make clear, too, right in the bulleted features set that end user privacy is wholly respected for those who may be concerned if installing these scripts and loading logo images and such are in some way being counted and used for popularity measurements or for other data collection.
@David W. Boles:
The only phone home issue is that if you click on the “send a test email to engtech” link it sends a test email to me. :)
All of the images are embedded in the script, not loaded from a web host, so there are no bugs.
I’ll add a bit to the documentation that privacy is respected.
@David W. Boles:
I’ve updated the page with some info about privacy. Let me know what you think.
I’m can’t seem to get the script to work.
I’m using the following:
- Firefox 2.0.0.8
- Bettermail addon
- WordPress blog theme BlueQ
The strange thing is that it pops up a new tab saying: posted your comment when i’m using the test comment function near the top of the screen. The last post pops up, but no comment there.
Also when trying to send a answer through mail, somehow it doesn’t change the mailto: link to gmail.
Strange..
Will see if i can get it working. If you have any ideas in the meantime, feel free to comment…
Update: after changing to the Styleicious Theme Comment Ninja works.. Well, i don’t know what happened, but ‘ll stick to this theme then.
@prof kienstra:
Glad it’s working for you now.
WoW! This really is great!
Your plugin cuts short so much of the work i already do. Thanks for your efforts!
It appears that part of the this has stopped working for me. I can respond via email, but the comment portion isn’t working. I thought it might have been because I had installed Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin, so I deactivated that, but that didn’t accomplish anything. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I should note that it did work at one point.
2008/01/02 - 0.5
- don’t display comment ninja in mass-edit mode, since it doesn’t work on that mode
- wordpress.com added avatars to the comment display and they were being sent in emails
- on multi-author blogs it grays out the comments you can’t edit
@ yonigre:
sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this, I was on holidays.
It usually doesn’t work because of anti-spam plugins.
Can you tell me the url for your blog so I can investigate this?
Thanks, that would http://www.yonigreenbaum.com
@ yonigre:
The problem is that you’re blog is using recaptcha.. comment ninja doesn’t play well with captcha.
@ yonigre:
Or is that really the problem… hmmm
@ yonigre:
I’ve tested WordPress Comment Ninja with your blog and it fills out the comment properly… except the ReCaptcha stops it.
You should look about disabling your captcha when you are logged in as administrator and it should work fine.
Hi
Very Thanks for this, but it has a problem with gmail and utf8 comment :(
please fix it.
@ Saeid:
I took a look at getting Comment Ninja to work with utf8, but I can’t figure it out
There doesn’t seem to be any way for Comment Ninja to know when to use utf8 or not, so it will remain unsupported unless someone else figures it out and sends me a patch.
@ engtech
Hi
It’s sample comment:
میثم,
سلام
شما از چه نرم ا٠زاری برای IRC است٠اده می
Ú(c)نید؟
دستور وارد شدنش /join هست ولی نرم ا٠زار
های Ù…Øیط گرا٠یÚ(c)ÛŒ هم دارن
مو٠ق باشید
I want to cooperation with you to fix it.
I would really love to be able to utilize this, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me. It tells me that the comment is posted, when it actually isn’t.
Perhaps you could have a look for me? I am using the Mandigo theme.
http://www.bloggingwv.com
Doesn’t work on my other blog either. Using Mimbo theme.
http://www.mywiinews.com
@Bucky.
Hi, as Saeid says, UTF-8 is not in support.
and i suggest to change base Encoding to utf-8
it is base encoding in all of google pages, and support all languages humans know!
there is no need another encoding.
Ideas for next release:
- figure out why my branch on my other PC is broken, was it the utf8 hack I tried?
- track last 10 comments responded to
- possible 255 character url limit prob? try http://icanhaz.com/commentninja instead?
- multiauthor blog is missing a pipe in the Respond box. Take a look at lorelle.wordpress.com to see it in action
it worked for me thank u
http://www.syria-soft.net
WordPress 2.5 support will be added mid-April.
Unfortunately I run on WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress and I’m stuck here in pre-2.5 land until they do the update so I can’t fix any of my scripts/programs that break with 2.5.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/12239.user.js
WordPress Comment Ninja with WP 2.5 support
I’m glad you choose the collapse of the logo, now you need to go one more step and simply add a text called “expand” and turn off auto expand. It’s kinda of annoying when it keeps popping open.
is it working with:
- Firefox 2.0.0.8?
it don`t works:-(
@ Newbies:
Firefox 2.0.0.14 is the latest official version of Firefox.
It’s more likely a problem with other plugins you have installed then it is a problem with Firefox.
i am also using wordpress comment ninja on my site http://www.seodiscoveries.com . If you have the registeration facility then please register me.. because i am ur regular visitor. please keep me updated using my email address
Ajax doesn’t work with your script on wordpress 2.5.1…
page reload everytime i click on approve :|
better comment manager also reload page :|
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