The Potential of WordPress Comments

WordPress comments are missing critical functionality to really embrace engagement and community — there are no notifications when your comment is approved or gets a reply, which prevents any kind of continued discussion.

In this video I’m demonstrating an update to the Comment Approval Notifications plugin (which hasn’t been touched in 10 years) to extend the notifications to comment approvals, replies and new comments in general.

Jetpack comments has some of these features but I wonder if there is a place for a decentralized solution?

An alternative to email is the Fediverse which supports replies across WordPress sites and other ActivityPub clients. In addition, it also handles notifications nicely in the mobile apps.

What do you think?

5 Comments

  1. Kaspars says:

    Testing replies to WP federated content. This should show up in the comments of the post.

  2. Dan Knauss says:

    @kaspars I think there are a lot of things missing from comments to make the default experience more supportive of prosocial behaviour, more like a semi-public space — for example, a street café. https://canada.wordcamp.org/2025/what-is-your-favourite-public-space/

  3. Dan Knauss says:

    To enhance WordPress comment functionality, consider replacing comments with Webmentions for better engagement and reduced spam. If using comments, enable them selectively, add spam protection, disable nested comments, and introduce moderator roles. Additional features like private comments, comment notifications, and user identification can improve user experience and interaction quality.

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