Decent Comments

Decent Comments shows what people say.

If you want to show comments along with their author’s avatars and an excerpt of their comment, then this is the right plugin for you.

And it’s not limited to just a widget showing recent comments: The plugin provides configurable widgets, shortcodes and an API to display comments in sensible ways, including author avatars, links, comment excerpts …

Anywhere you place comments, by means of a widget, a shortcode or an API call, you can:

  • Show an excerpt or the full comment. You can choose to not show the comment as well.
  • Determine the number of words shown for excerpts.
  • Set your kind of ellipsis.
  • Set the number of comments to show.
  • Show the author’s avatar and determine it’s size.
  • Sort by author email, author URL, content (what’s said in the comment), date, karma or post … in ascending or descending order.
  • Show comments for the current post or for a specific post.
  • Show comments for posts in specific categories, for specific tags, … (more precisely: the ability to show comments from posts related to one or more terms in a chosen taxonomy).
  • and more …

Feedback is welcome! If you need help, have problems, want to leave feedback or want to provide constructive criticism, please leave a comment.

Please try to solve problems before you rate this plugin or say it doesn’t work. There goes a lot of work into providing you with free quality plugins! Please appreciate that and help with your feedback. Thanks!

Documentation

The documentation is available on the Decent Comments documentation pages.

352 Responses to Decent Comments

  1. frank January 6, 2024 at 10:55 pm #

    I am using “ultimate_member”, will it be possible to SHOW only the comments of each user? 😥

    • Kento January 15, 2024 at 11:48 am #

      Hi Frank, I don’t know if that is possible but you could approach any customization using the filters for comments, as the plugin obtains the comments using the WP_Comment_Query class, see this line for the query call that could be filtered in a similar way that the plugin does (it adds its filter just before that call and removes it afterwards).

      • frank January 24, 2024 at 3:58 am #

        gracias hermano

  2. Artur November 22, 2023 at 9:25 am #

    Is it possible to configure the widget in such a way that comments are grouped to a post (so that in the case of a large number of comments to one post, the entire list is not filled with just one post) and, for example, under the link to the commented post, provide the last 5 links to the comments of a given post?

    I want the list to be displayed like this:

    – commented post 1 (title and link) – last date of comment:
    user1, user2, user3, user4, user5 (and linking to a specific comment)
    – commented post 2 (title and link) – last date of comment:
    user1, user2, user3, user4, user5 (and linking to a specific comment)
    – commented post 3 (title and link) – last date of comment:
    user1, user2, user3, user4, user5 (and linking to a specific comment)

    THX!

    • Kento December 1, 2023 at 3:25 pm #

      Hi Artur,

      Thanks for your question! What you describe would not be possible to achieve with the plugin, but maybe you could use parts of it as an inspiration to derive your own code. If you look at the get_comments() method, this is in charge of rendering comments, where you could create a similar solution which groups the comments per post. I would recommend to create your own shortcode for that, to keep the default provided by the plugin separate from your customized solution.

      Cheers

  3. Universe November 7, 2022 at 3:28 am #

    Hi,
    I have found that if I refresh the page many times, the decent-comments widgets will disappear.

    • Kento November 8, 2022 at 11:36 am #

      Hi, does this happen when you clear your cache or disable it?

  4. Universe November 7, 2022 at 3:16 am #

    Hi,
    I have activated the plugins, and set it in widgets page. But it did not appear in my website. I use the newest version in WordPress.

    • Universe November 7, 2022 at 3:18 am #

      I have tried many time, and I found it is because the title don’t support Chinese! When I type Chinese, I disappeared.

      • Kento November 7, 2022 at 10:37 pm #

        Hi, there’s no issue with using Chinese or any other language in the widget’s title. That won’t affect whether it appears or not.

    • Kento November 7, 2022 at 10:26 pm #

      Sounds like it might be a caching issue … did you clear caches after adding it?

  5. Voocha October 28, 2021 at 6:16 am #

    Dear,
    We’re using your Decent Comments,
    We want to ask:
    In the shortcode, how do I display: The number of comments for a post.
    For example: 1 post has 55 comments, we want to display this number 55 at the end of the post title

    Thank you guys, you have a great plugin

    • Kento November 2, 2021 at 9:03 am #

      Hi Voocha,

      For this case it would be recommendable to use the decent_comments_comment_output filter, it’s documented on the API page.

      You can customize the output for each individual comment using that filter. In your case, you could append the information on the number of comments for the particular post that the comment has been posted on.

      Note that the filter receives the $comment_ID in its arguments, so you would first have to obtain the comment, then obtain the post ID and use that to get the number of comments on the post.

      Example implementation of such a filter: https://gist.github.com/itthinx/7f759490e1acd565a3532ee4d3cd9534

      See also the documentation on WordPress’ add_filter and Hooks.

      Cheers

  6. Giang September 14, 2021 at 12:45 am #

    Hi, I’m using wpdicuz in private mode but I still want it to show comments in your plugin? Please help me, thank you

    • Kento September 17, 2021 at 8:29 am #

      Hi!

      If the wpDiscuz plugin is protecting its private comments (they seem to have an extension for that which you are probably using), then I would assume that these would not be displayed via Decent Comments when someone who is not authorized is viewing comments. But if the queries are correct for the context and the viewing user, I would assume that the private comments would be included. If that is not the case, they plugins simply aren’t compatible.

      Cheers

  7. Dhg September 13, 2021 at 9:19 am #

    So heplfull
    Thanksssssss

    • Kento September 17, 2021 at 8:22 am #

      Great, thanks! 🙂

  8. Kit August 21, 2021 at 9:38 am #

    Great widget but I couldn’t figure out the way of limiting the display to only those groups to which the current user belongs.
    Thanks
    Kit

    • Kento August 21, 2021 at 2:21 pm #

      Hi Kit,

      Please have a look at the Widgets section in the documentation on Groups, this might be what you’re looking for. Please note that to use it, you will need to use Classic Widgets for now, as Widgets Control Pro is not compatible with the new Block Widgets Editor introduced in WordPress 5.8.

      Cheers

      • Kit August 21, 2021 at 3:48 pm #

        Many thanks Kento I’ll take a look

  9. Li-An December 13, 2020 at 12:03 pm #

    Hello, for some reason, Gravatar is not floating left on my sites (and on a test site with last default theme). I wish a little more style on the comments : bold for authors, italic for date and so on. Thanks for your plugin.

    • Kento December 14, 2020 at 11:55 am #

      Hi Li-An!

      Thanks for using it! What you describe can be done with appropriate CSS rules to customize your theme.

      Cheers

      • Li-An December 14, 2020 at 1:53 pm #

        Yes, I know how to do but, by default, the comments are not super readable. Thanks for your quick answer, I will have a look.

  10. Katy Durnford October 22, 2020 at 8:29 am #

    Hi there

    Does this support pagination as well if you ask it to display 5 items?

    best wishes
    Katy

    • Kento October 22, 2020 at 3:37 pm #

      Hi Katy,

      Good question, currently it doesn’t support pagination but we have it noted as an improvement for some future update. Thanks for asking, it’s good to know that there is interest in having that.

      Cheers

  11. X.MIOLAND September 21, 2020 at 7:56 pm #

    I’am not able to display post comments of a specific category (slug of category is test)
    I use the shortcode : [decent_comments taxonomy="category" terms="test"]
    It’s the same if i use widget
    Thanks

    • Kento September 22, 2020 at 12:27 am #

      Hi,

      This is working fine with the latest WordPress version so I would suggest to check for other plugins that might be interfering and disable them.

      Cheers

      • X.MIOLAND September 22, 2020 at 9:34 am #

        OK it’s resolve…
        Thanks

  12. David September 1, 2020 at 6:37 pm #

    Is there a way to organize comments by most likes instead of date or author name?

    • Kento September 4, 2020 at 9:31 pm #

      Hi David, most likes would probably be related to a plugin that records likes on comments – it’s not something that this supports. Sounds like a good idea though!

  13. kenjacq July 12, 2020 at 3:08 pm #

    While using the shortcode, I’m adding strip_tags=”false”. However all comment text runs together without line breaks from the original comment post. All else is working great, except for this. Any thoughts?

    • Kento July 20, 2020 at 8:08 am #

      I guess this is because the line breaks you mention are in fact paragraphs within HTML p elements and those get stripped away with this option.

      • kenjacq July 20, 2020 at 3:38 pm #

        I was under the impression that strip_tags=”false” would not strip away the formatting. I’ve also tried the opposite logic, strip_tags=”true” with the same result. Additionally, any hyperlinks which may be present within a comment are not linked.

        Whereas viewing these comments within (beneath) the WordPress Post itself – all formatting is present (as well as any embedded links which may be present in a comment).

        I suppose whatever underlying cause here with Decent Comments rendering may be outside the apparent issue with this plugin. Perhaps it’s something else. I was hoping it would be a relatively simple/quick remedy, something I missed – because I do like the plugin and its usefulness. Thanks.

        • Kento August 5, 2020 at 2:35 pm #

          Hi there,

          I think that in your case, something else must be removing the tags. If you take [decent_comments strip_tags="false"] for example, it will show links, paragraphs, etc.

          Make sure that you use straight double quotes to enclose the value you pass to the shortcode attribute: " – otherwise WordPress will not recognize the value you try to pass on.

          Cheers

  14. Kento July 10, 2020 at 12:54 pm #

    Would you buy a premium version of our Decent Comments plugin for WordPress?

    Please vote and reply with your ideas: https://twitter.com/itthinx/status/1281571957968969729

  15. Mayavin July 9, 2020 at 4:20 pm #

    Hi, the plugin is taking the default headline/body font from the theme and I would like it to use another one. `
    Could you please tell me where can I modify the CSS and what class to use?

    • Kento July 10, 2020 at 12:37 pm #

      Hi Mayavin,

      You can find out easily which classes are used on the elements that you are concerned with by using the Inspector Web Developer tool in Firefox (Firefox > Tools > Web Developer > Inspector). Create a child theme based on the theme you would like to customize and add your CSS to its stylesheet.

      Cheers

  16. Acid June 11, 2020 at 6:22 pm #

    Hi! First, thank your for your plugin. It’s the only avaliable to create a “Last comments page”. So I did, with some modifications to the code to break the lines (you provided the modifications in a comment).
    https://www.saindodamatrix.com.br/comentarios/

    The only problem I have is when someone posts an instagram link, with preview, and when someone posts an image. In the first case, the preview breaks the formatting, and in the second case the image doesn’t appear at all. Could you help me pointing what to change in the code to do that? Thank you.

    • Kento July 1, 2020 at 12:01 am #

      Hi there!

      Thanks for using the plugin 🙂

      If the preview that you mention is not structurally sound, then that would be the cause. This is independent from what Decent Comments does so you would have to get them fix their code.

      Cheers

  17. Igor February 13, 2020 at 9:18 am #

    Hi
    Pls inform whether it is possible to set random comments for each page/post as widget?
    Thanks

    • Kento March 12, 2020 at 4:17 pm #

      Hi Igor,

      Thanks for asking, random order is not supported for comments.

      Cheers

  18. CHumain October 23, 2019 at 9:08 am #

    Hi,
    Maybe I’m at the right place to ask..
    I’m looking for a possibility to simply integrate and display on my blog WordPress the comments I posted in others blogs.
    I want to show my visitors the comments I left on other blogs. But it’s not possible with Decent Comments…
    Do you have an idea ?
    Many Thx
    JP

    • Kento October 24, 2019 at 1:52 pm #

      Hi JP,

      Thanks for asking, this wouldn’t be possible with the plugin though. It’s intent is to work with the comments on its blog, it wouldn’t be able to pull in those you have left on others.

      Cheers

      • JP October 24, 2019 at 3:00 pm #

        Hi Kento,
        Thx. It’s a pity I think this plug-in does not exist elsewhere.
        Maybe it would be nice to work on it..
        Just an idea a suggestion.
        Good continuation !
        JP

        • Kento October 24, 2019 at 4:47 pm #

          Thanks JP, yes I can see that could indeed be quite useful 🙂

          • JP October 24, 2019 at 5:19 pm #

            You are a magician !))

        • Clemens Vermeulen May 17, 2020 at 10:46 pm #

          Some web sites provide a Comments RSS feed, sometimes even for a particular category or post.. You can display that RSS feed (stock standard WordPress function) in a widget on your site.
          You will get ALL comments however. You would need a more capable RSS plugin to filter the feed by author name.

  19. Ian Giles August 2, 2019 at 10:43 am #

    Hi,

    Is there a way to get the post link to open in a separate tab/page when clicked?

    Thanks

    • Kento August 5, 2019 at 5:44 pm #

      Hi Ian,

      Not as an option although there is the decent_comments_comments_output filter hook which could be used to modify the output. You’d have to parse it though which might be a bit of an overkill. If Javascript is an option, the link is rendered within a span with CSS class comment-link and that could be easily targeted to add the target=”_blank” attribute to the anchor.

      Cheers

  20. Acid June 21, 2019 at 4:05 pm #

    Hi, you have a highly configurable “Decent comments” for WordPress. Thank you for that! My only struggle is the formatting of the comments. It doesn’t retain line breaks, nor clickable links. Is there something I can do?

    • Kento June 26, 2019 at 10:12 am #

      Hi!

      Thanks for using it! There is an option that can be used with the shortcode:

      [decent_comments strip_tags="false"]

      If you use this instead of the widget, the comments will retain the formatting.

      As the Decent Comments widget currently does not offer the option itself, you can use this in combination with a content block from our Widgets Control.

      Cheers

  21. Scott January 8, 2019 at 6:06 am #

    I have installed the plugin and put it into a left sidebar and the layout of the comments is totally messed up. I can see the HTML and CSS through the developers console and the “floats” and “display” fields seem all wrong. For example I click “Show Date” and I see the generated CSS has “display: none;”
    Is there a version of WordPress this simply is not compatible with?

    • Kento January 9, 2019 at 2:06 pm #

      Hi Scott,

      The plugin is compatible up to the latest version, but what you describe sounds like a representation issue and that stems from the theme you are using itself. You will likely need to adjust or add CSS rules to make it fit in.

      Do you have an example page where we could see it in action?

      Cheers

  22. Johan November 16, 2018 at 9:57 am #

    Hi!
    Can you please help me…
    I need to translate the “at” in the date and time string.
    Loco Translate couldn’t do it…
    Kind regards,
    Johan

    • Kento November 22, 2018 at 9:40 am #

      Hi Johan,

      If you check the plugin’s decent-comments.pot in its languages folder, you will find the translatable string ” %1$s at %2$s”.

      Cheers

      • Johan November 22, 2018 at 10:16 am #

        I have already translated that string and it works great when I am using the widget.
        But on a common page with comments it still shows “at”.
        Maybe I have to translate it somewhere else then…?
        It is truly strange, because in my wp-admin/comment.php it is also translated…
        Regards,
        Johan

        • Kento November 23, 2018 at 1:22 am #

          I think that those might not be from the plugin then – you say common page, you mean the comments that appear below the content?

          • Johan November 23, 2018 at 6:58 am #

            I found it!
            It was hardcoded in my theme, overriding WordPress own translation.
            Thank anyway, for a great and Decent Comments plugin.
            Regards,
            Johan

            • Kento November 23, 2018 at 5:34 pm #

              Ah perfect, glad to hear that you found it and many thanks for using the plugin! If you have any suggestions for it anytime, please let me know. Cheers!

  23. Eric October 16, 2018 at 3:33 pm #

    Thank you for your great plugin Decent Comments that I’ve used for years. Ideally the backend widget would have a box “Number of days to restrict” where a default value of 0 means no restriction… whereas 14 means to restrict to only those whose date is within the last 14 days.

    I’m not sure where I should add code to do this and what code would be the most efficient.

    I’m sure many sites prefer showing no comments rather than displaying comments that are months or years old.

    Are you able to share a hack for this, or enrich the plugin to incorporate this?

    • Kento October 25, 2018 at 10:23 pm #

      Hi Eric,

      Many thanks for your kind comment and suggestion on the plugin. I have taken note of your suggestion as a feature to limit comments displayed not older than x days as a feature enhancement to be added to it. I can’t promise on an ETA for it yet, but I think it’s a valid option that can be added.

      Cheers

  24. Ben S. March 26, 2018 at 10:35 pm #

    Is there a way to only show one comment per original post? I would like to make sure a single post with a bunch of comments doesn’t dominate the list of recent comments.

    Thanks!
    Ben

    • antonio March 27, 2018 at 6:50 am #

      Hi Ben,
      Sorry there isn’t this option. You can use the ‘decent_comments_comments_output’ filter. In this code you have an example of use where the comments order is changed, you can use this code as reference for filter the comments.
      You need to change the shuffle( $comments ); instruction.
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

  25. Randy February 22, 2018 at 11:40 pm #

    Hi, Great plugin!!!. Is there any way to add the comments star ratings? something like – show_star_rating=”true” ???

    • antonio March 16, 2018 at 9:52 am #

      Hi Randy,
      Sorry the plugin doesn’t support rating. If you are using another plugin to add ratings to comments, you can use the ‘decent_comments_comment_output’ filter for add code in every comment content.
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

  26. scr00chy February 17, 2018 at 11:52 pm #

    Also, would it be possible to add an option to shorten post titles to a certain number of characters, similarly to how you can limit the comment excerpt length?

    • antonio February 19, 2018 at 4:59 pm #

      Hi,
      You can truncate the widget title using the ‘widget_title’ filter, but this will affect to all widgets.
      Also you could use css to truncate the text, this post can help you.
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

      • Petr February 19, 2018 at 5:28 pm #

        Hi Antonio,
        thanks for the reply. I don’t think this helps me, though. I’m talkin about truncating just the “comment-link” segment because my post titles are often long so they take up a lot of space when I make a list of recent comments for example: https://imgur.com/888AkkF

        But maybe I just don’t know how to apply the CSS correctly, or I’m misunderstanding.

        Anyway, I’ll try to send you the Czech translation as soon as I can.

        • antonio February 20, 2018 at 9:18 am #

          Hi Petr,
          please give me your url, I will try to solve it by css.
          Kind Regards,
          Antonio B.

          • Petr February 20, 2018 at 11:45 am #

            It’s http://www.elonx.cz (specifically the recent comments widget in the sidebar)

            • antonio February 21, 2018 at 11:08 am #

              Thanks,
              Please try with this:
              .decent-comments .comment {
              overflow: hidden;
              text-overflow: ellipsis;
              }
              .decent-comments .comment .comment-link {
              white-space: nowrap;
              }

              Kind Regards,
              Antonio B.

              • Petr February 21, 2018 at 5:48 pm #

                Hi, thanks for the code. The result is okayish on Chrome (not perfect though, due to this resulting in the user name being on a separate line which wastes space) but the truncation works. Problem is that on Firefox it doesn’t display correctly – longer user names get broken up into two lines for some reason (even though the line is otherwise mostly empty). But don’t worry about it too much. The untruncated links aren’t the end of the world, although I’d still prefer an option in the plugin itself that would do the link truncating. 🙂

                Keep up the good work and thanks for the help!

  27. scr00chy February 17, 2018 at 11:50 pm #

    Hi, I’d like to provide Czech translation for your plugin. Could you email me the file(s) that I could translate?

    • antonio February 19, 2018 at 4:49 pm #

      Hi scr00chy,
      Sure, in the ‘languages’ folder in the plugin you have a decent-comments.pot file that you can use with poedit.
      When you have the files please send them to me antonio[at]itthinx[dot]com
      Thank you very much for the contribution !!
      Kind regards,
      Antonio B.

  28. Tobias February 9, 2018 at 9:45 am #

    Hello Antonio,

    thanks for the wow plugin.
    a) Maybe include to shift the answer to comments a bit to the right. So it is more than a conversation. like above.
    b) alternate the background color like above.

    This would be very nice.

    • Tobias February 9, 2018 at 9:58 am #

      c) i miss the date of the comments, like above.

      • antonio February 9, 2018 at 3:49 pm #

        Hi Tobias,
        The widget in the actual version includes an ‘Show date’ option. The shortcode version includes an “show_date” param. Sorry, we are improving the documentation.
        Kind Regards,
        Antonio B.

    • antonio February 9, 2018 at 3:45 pm #

      Hi Tobias,
      Thank you very much for the suggestions.We will review them.
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

  29. Monica February 5, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

    One of the roles is added manually while the other is automated during registration. So, there is a default role. Anyone can register and get to level 1 (the least amount of privileges, who shouldn’t see all comments) and I have to manually add people to level 2 (they can see all comments). Thanks for your help, Antonio.

    • antonio February 6, 2018 at 4:05 pm #

      Hi Monica,
      Related to the registration process, I think this plugin can help you ( adds a user to a group based on role, a group named after the role is created automatically if needed ). Or this code, in this case, you need to add this code in your functions.php child theme file, changing ‘Premium’ for your group name.
      The changes of roles manually, you can change the user group from the Users->All users section (above the table you have an easy option)
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

  30. Maarten February 5, 2018 at 10:46 am #

    Posting the same question again, as I do not see my question in this thread:

    I read ‘Mr. blabla’ on (Page name). Is there a way to translate the word ‘on’ as this should be ‘in’ in Dutch?
    Or do I have to make .mo/po files etc.?

    • antonio February 6, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

      Hi Maarten,
      In the plugin you have a ‘languages’ folder where you have a .po file that you can use to create the dutch translation. Sorry, we don’t have dutch translation.
      If you send it to us when you have the translation, we will add it to the repository.
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

  31. Monica February 4, 2018 at 4:39 pm #

    I have different roles on my site, and only one role can see all comments. Will it filter out comments based on role? Can it be customized to do that? Thanks!

    • antonio February 5, 2018 at 9:03 am #

      Hi Monica,
      There isn’t a filter based on roles, but you could add all users of this role, to a specific group, and restrict the comments to this group.
      I will try to help you, how do you add the users to the role? When registering? Manually?
      Kind Regards,
      Antonio B.

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