Comment Rating plugin: FAQ
Sep 27th, 2009 by BoB
Why are the voting image in gray?
If the thumbs are grey, it’s most likely working well. Comment author cannot vote on his/her own comments. That’s why the voting images are grayed out and don’t respond to mouse-over. But if you change to a different IP address, you’ll be able to see the clickable images and mouse-over effects.
If all your computers go through the same ADSL/Cable router, they all have the same external IP address. The thumb will stay gray, until your IP address changes (e.g. rebooting the router).
To others, the thumbs should be in color.
When I try to click either vote button, the button changes size as it’s supposed to but no vote is logged and nothing changes to a checkmark. Why?
The problem is that Commet Rating javascript is not loaded. If you theme doesn’t call wp_footer() then the line to load javascript will not be inserted. Have a look at the page source code (Ctrl-U with Firefox), you should see in the Javascript in the footer section, see image.
I get a javascript error with this in the title bar.
If the error says, “Nothing found for /wp-content/plugins/comment-rating/ck-processkarma.php” or similar, and your hosting server have phpSuExec enabled, you must have the permission 777 on your /wp-content/plugins or /wp-content/plugins/comment-rating. PHPSUEXEC will refuse to serve any pages that are at security risk, for example with 777 as permissions. (will generate an Internal Server Error).
Changing the directory permission to 644 (removing the writable access rights) should solve the problem.
My Suffusion theme displays the voting icon and numbers in separate lines.
If you use the popular Suffusion Theme, you will see the voting icons and numbers are shown in separated lines, like below.
It’s the definition of the line of “display: block;” that caused the problem.
.commentlist small {
margin-bottom: 5px;
display: block;
font-size: 87%;
}
You need to remove the “display: block;” line. Then everything will be fine.
My native language is not supported. How do I add a translation?
Please install the plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/codestyling-localization/ . After installation, Codestyling Localization’s page is under Wordpress Admin page: Tool->Localization. Locate Comment Rating plugin. Click “Add Language”.
Now you need to do the next 3 steps:
- click “Rescan” beside the language you created.
- then click on “Edit”, beside the language you created.
- “Edit” will show you a list of terms used in Comment Rating. You need to click on “Edit” for each term to add your translation. Then “Save” or “Save/Next” until you’re done for each term.
When you’re done, please send me the ‘ckrating_xx_XX.po’ and ‘ckrating_xx_XX.mo’ files in the comment-rating plugin directory. I’ll distribute the translation in future release with acknowledgment to your contribution.
I’d love to have an option to hide the comment altogether (not just comment_text) but the whole comment. How can this be done?
WordPress filters does not allow this to happen. But you can customize your theme to skip displaying a comment if the rating is too low. I can also help. Please see here.
Can I style the whole comment box of highly-rated/poorly-rated/hotly-debated comments
Yes. the comment styling uses the new comment_class filter (introduced in WordPress 2.7). If your theme doesn’t use WordPress 2.7 wp_list_comments(), you’ll only see the comment text background being styled or highlighted. To fix the problem, you need to add comment_class into your existing theme. For example code, please see here.
My nested comment box highlighting is messed up!
When using nested comments, the styling of a highly or poorly-rated comment is passed on to every comment below it. This means that every comment nested below a low-rated comment becomes semi-opaque, even if it is high-rated itself. The end result is huge blocks of dim text that are difficult to read.
Also highly-rated comments pass on that style to everything below it, resulting in huge blocks of styled text that obscure the rating of comments that are not really highly rated.
The problem is caused by styling the whole comment box. To solve the problem, just turn off comment box styling.
How do I set the thresholds of highly-rated/poorly-rated/hotly-debated comments?
This is the tricky part. Setting the thresholds too low, every comment becomes highlighted or hidden. Setting them too high, nothing changes and you cannot draw readers attention.
Every blog’s readers are different. Some have passionate and active readers who vote on almost every comment. Some have indifferent readers who don’t want to click.
There’s no magic formula. You’ll have to experiment. Hopefully, it’s fun to play with the numbers.
Can a comment be both highly-rated, and poorly-rated or hotly-debated?
Yes, if you’re not careful with your thresholds. Won’t there be messy formatting? No, there won’t be. Rest assured. Comment Rating will use only one style based on the following descending priorities: highly-rated, poorly-rated, hotly-debated.
How do I turn off one or more styling?
You can do so by simple set the threshold for the undesired feature to a high number. For example, if you don’t use hotly-debated highlighting, set its threshold to 1000.
When a comment is hidden, will search engines index them?
Comment Rating uses HTML style attribute “display:none” to hide poorly-rated comments. The comment text are still in the HTML page. They are just not shown by the browser. All search engines will index those text.
Why sometimes the voting number does not change ?
The up or down vote counts will change rightaway after the visitor has casted a vote and change color to grey indicating the vote has been accepted. However, if you have wp-cache or wp-super-cache enable, other visitors will not see the refreshed vote counts until the cached page expires and reload.
To keep the vote count fresh, please set wp-cache/wp-super-cache Expire time to 1 hour or less.
The clickable images don’t show up. Why?
There may be multiple reasons.
Possibility 1: If your Apache error log show an error like this:
error_log:[Wed Aug 19 09:42:20 2009] [error] [client 10.9.1.67] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/html/try/wp-content/plugins/comment-rating/images/up.png,
You have a misconfigured Apache server which preventing the loading of the images. Please Google “client denied by server configuration” to see how others deal with the issue, e.g. http://www.raditha.com/blog/archives/000896.html.
Possibility 2: You may have configured your Wordpress URL to be, for example, http://CaptionWit.com/index.php. Please change it to http://CaptionWit.com under Settings -> General: WordPress address (URL).
Is there a list of plugins this may be incompatible with?
Comment Rating uses a unique name space, ‘ckrating’. There should be no conflict with other plugins. But you never know.
Warning in PHP, should I be worried?
I have this PHP warning message below News in the control panel
Warning: gzinflate() [function.gzinflate]: data error in /xxx/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/http.php on line 1787.
This is a bug in the Wordpress http.php file. I’ve reported to the Wordpress team. So far, the only problem it generates is the warning message.
Don’t worry. This is not a problem. And it will be fixed by the Wordpress team.
After clicking the voting image a popup comes up …
If you observes a pop-up box saying: “Response: done”, this is the normal response code. The browser javascript should handle it by update the votes and changing the image to a checkmark. The “Response: done” should not show up at all, unless you’ve enabled javascript debugging or something similar. Try change to a different browser.
Here are a few more error messages:
- “Your browser does not support the XMLHttpRequest Object!”: please change to a different browser or upgrade your browser
- “Response has no value”, “Error: Try again later”, “Error: Query Error”, “Error: Comment Query error”, “Error: Comment doesnt exist”, “Error: Fatal: html format error”: These mean that Comment Rating backend has various problem accessing the database. The problem varies from non-existing comment ID entry to having problem access the database. These basically mean that your Wordpress database is corrupted or the database is too busy. You should seek help from a Professional (someone knows Wordpress and mySQL well). If you are the Professional and you’re sure your DB is not too busy, backup your database (using phpMyAdmin or Wp-DBManager plugin), and then using the same tool to drop the table “wp_comment_rating” table, de-activate and re-activate Comment Rating.
Why, as a Canadian, am I not allowed to rate comments or submit one. I’m getting the message that there is no Karma and try again later. But later never comes. What’s up with that?
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[Reply]
Bob King
Reply:
October 11th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I’m also a Canadian. But the politician I voted for never took office
You have all my sympathy.
The error message you state appears to be a server busy issue. Can you be more specific about the site URL? I can have a look.
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Wp 2.9 offers the possibility for further integration with this plugin:
Comment metadata: plugins and themes can now take advantage of arbitrary metadata for comments, just as for posts, pages, and users. This should make it easier to create plugins to highlight “popular” or “hot” comments, among other things.
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[Reply]
I can vote only once per IP. When I try to vote on another comment, vote icons are gray (different user, different comment). So, after my first vote I can’t vote anymore (all comment icons are gray).
Btw, nice plugin, but still need work on it.
Regards, Ivan
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[Reply]
Ignore my post above. Now its fixed. I just need to add some code in footer (.js) to work properly.
Thanks for this great plugin.
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Hello, the clickeable image dont show up in my theme and the error isn’t in the list of the faq. When i saw the source code, the img tag of the votess just didn’t appear.
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 24th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Frank,
Are the inline style sheet (clearly marked as inserted by Comment Rating) in the HTML Head section? If not, the plugin is not enabled.
Otherwise, please post your URL and I’ll have a look.
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Hi,
Is it possible to insert the comment voting into a post somehow using a php call maybe?
Example Post:
Link A – Like/Dislike
Link B – Like/Dislike
Link C – Like/Dislike
Thanks!
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 25th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Do you mean to insert into the Post saying,
“Here’s the top three comments:
Comment A – Like/Dislike
Comment B – Like/Dislike
Comment C – Like/Dislike”
That’s a great idea. I can see this can be very useful. Unfortunately, it’s not doable yet. I’ll add to the Todo list.
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[Reply]
Hi,
That isn’t actually what I meant but it is a great idea and I’d also be very interested in it.
An example of what I was referring to can be seen here: http://www.watch-movies-online.tv/movies/the_tournament/
As you can see each link has the ability to be rated. I’d like to be able to call this plugin via a php call so I can insert it anywhere in a post and replicate the functionality in the example site.
Thanks!
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 25th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
If I understand the sample site correctly, we are getting into post rating space. Comment Rating ties close into the comments, not posts. You can try WP-post rating or GD star rating.
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Is it possible to only allow registered members to vote? How can this be accomplished? Thank you.
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 26th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Voting by registered member only is not available yet. But will be in the future.
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 26th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I’ve added voting only by registered member/comment contributor to Todo list.
You have an excellent site. Do you use a customized Woo Theme? Which one?
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[Reply]
Fauna
chinasmack.com Reply:
October 26th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
What is Woo Theme? Our theme is custom. Thank you for your compliment.
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My thumbs are voting icons are grayed out and don’t respond on mouse-over even from other computers?
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 27th, 2009 at 7:27 am
If the thumbs are grey, it’s most likely working well. If all your computers go through the same ADSL/Cable router, they all have the same external IP address. The thumb will stay gray, until your IP address changes (e.g. rebooting the router).
To others, the thumbs will be in color.
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[Reply]
hi,
i’m looking for a way to insert the ckarma via css to somewhere else, let’s say to the comment-meta div, but i had though luck to find the necessary css classes, any suggestions?
thank’s in advance.
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[Reply]
ron
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
hi again,
i assigned meanwhile tags with classes , so that worked somehow, but then there is still a question; i’m not such a good php guy , but all i need is to insert the rating as get_comment_date so next to the date instead somewhere above or below the post.
where exactly can i add or replace what with “get_comment_date” in the comment_rating.php?
thank’s in advance
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I’m not sure what you try to do. Are you trying to move the voting images to the same line as comment date? You’ll need to disable auto-insert and call the comment-rating interface.
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ron
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
kinda placing a tag?
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ron
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October 29th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
ah i was not able to post the tag, since wordpress won’t allow critical php or other code snippets … so let me ask the other way around: to call the interface, what should i insert into the comment-meta div ?
thank’s
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
A tag around the voting images and words so that you can style it in CSS?
I can add a fix CSS tag to those content. Will it solve the problem?
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[Reply]
ron
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
finally i’ve found the tag, it was mentioned at bottom in the admin menu of the plug under “customized theme” so i’ve found this one right a minute ago.
but now i get only one button displayed instead of two , but the setting is on “both”.
is there probably a well known glitch or such?
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ron
Reply:
October 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
ok it worked now, a simple plugin enable/disable made the trick. thank’s a bunch for your help bob
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Hello,
I installed the plugin, it looks great, when I vote it works fine, the vote is counted and the logo becomes gray.
But, if i reload the page, the vote is lost, and the logo get back to the original state (unvoted). I voted again, again reloaded the webpage… the same thing.
The table field ck_rating_… is increasing normal, so the votes are stored in the table….
Can you, please, give me an advice?
Here is an example:
http://www.goingout.ro/yann-tiersen-la-sala-palatului/comment-page-1/#comment-3489
Thank you very much!
Ovidiu
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Do you run WP-cache or WP-super-cache?
If so, lower the expiry time to 1 hour or lower.
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0
[Reply]
Thank you very much for the quick answer.
Unfortunately, I don’t have that plugins installed…
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I tried it on your site. It’s like what you described.
Can you look at the wp_comment_rating database table to see if the votes are registered?
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[Reply]
Ovidiu
goingout.ro Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
yes, the votes are registered.
As you see, in the original state, the counter shows 0-0.
After the vote (if like), it changes to 2-0 (obviously, there are counted).
The table looks like this:
ck_comment_id ck_ips ck_rating_up ck_rating_down
3489 [BLOB - 55B] 2 1
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[Reply]
Now I noticed that in the wp-admin Comments section the plugin works corect.
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
If the plugin displays the votes correctly in admin page, then your website must be cached.
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Maybe the theme itself has some caching, no cache plugins are installed. I’ll check, thank you very much for your answers.
Good luck!
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When I vote on a comment I get a pop-up box saying: “Response:
done”
then another pop-up saying, “Karma not changed, please try again later.”
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Those are error messages indicating failed updating the database. This happens when the database is overloaded.
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[Reply]
sean
Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I am testing this plugin on localhost and messages appear too. What does it mean “overloaded database” in this case?
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[Reply]
sean
Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
…and after simply reloading the page, voting is done, so uploading the database seems to be ok…
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 10:22 am
@sean, if you observes a pop-up box saying: “Response: done”, this is the normal response code. The browser javascript should handle it by update the votes and changing the image to a checkmark. The “Response: done” should not show up at all, unless you’ve enabled javascript debugging or something similar. Try change to a different browser.
It’ll be more helpful if you can describe the exact error message.
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[Reply]
sean
Reply:
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:18 am
I have tested this plugin on my server in internet and everything is ok – image changes into a checkmark. That javascript messages show up only on localhost. I don’t know why but it doesn’t matter, i don’t need it working on localhost.
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BoB
Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 12:16 am
When the database cools down, please try again.
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Hello, How to display the rating on the right? thanks.
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[Reply]
Gregory
Reply:
November 16th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I want to get the same info… Thanks BoB
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
November 19th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Yes, that’s doable. Will try to put it into the next update.
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[Reply]
Cindy
Reply:
November 23rd, 2009 at 5:37 am
It’s great! Thanks BoB.
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Hi author, I want translate your plugin to russian language. Please tell me Your email, simply reply me to mrilyuha [ @ ] gmail.com. Thanks
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Hello,
“My Suffusion theme displays the voting icon and numbers in separate lines.
It’s the definition of the line of “display: block;” that caused the problem.
.commentlist small {
margin-bottom: 5px;
display: block;
font-size: 87%;
}”
Can you help me, I can not found these lines…
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0
[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
January 5th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Please look for “.commentlist small” line in your style.css and remove the “display: block”. The problem should be resolved.
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The website “allkpop.com” uses this type of commenting system and everytime I try to see the lowly rated comments I click on “Click here to see” and nothing shows up. Is there something on my computer blocking it or is it just low rated comments cannot be seen by anyone?
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It’s really confusing. I click the “thumb” icons on your page,NOTHING happend? The icon is not gray and the number is the same as before.Also I got the same problem on my pages.
My browser is IE (on Vista OS)
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[Reply]
BoB
Reply:
February 19th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I just tried my site with IE 8.0, on XP (no one can convince me moving to Vista), and the clicks register ok.
Now, did you turn Javascript off on your IE? If so, it explains.
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Hey, if you could make something like this for posts I would definitely pay for it. It would be exactly what I am looking for. I can see above that you mention it but I cant find anything about it anywhere.
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