I was urged by many users of Comment Rating to create a widget displaying Comment Rating results along with the comments on sidebars. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I chose to build the widget upon Krischan Jodies’ popular and stable “Get Recent Comment” widget. All the features of “Get Recent Comment” remain as is. The “Comment Rating Widget” plugin will track the most recent release “Get Recent Comment”.

This plugin is an add on to the Comment Rating plugin (version 2.9.0 or later). It displays ratings along with the most recent comments in the sidebar in formats of your design. The comment rating and images on display can be “Likes only”, “Dislikes only”, or Both. This is customizable by the “Value for comment_karma” option in Comment Rating.

The Pro version of the plugin can display comments ordered by their Comment Rating in the last X days. If you’re interested, please donate to get Comment Rating Widget Pro.

The plugin also comes with an internal cache to reduce performance impact on page loading.

If the Comment Rating plugin is not present, this plug in will function exactly as “Get Recent Comment”.

The following is Krischan Jodies’ description of Get Recent Comment.

This plugin shows excerpts of the latest comments and/or trackbacks in your sidebar. You have comprehensive control about their appearance. This ranges from the number of comments, the length of the excerpts up to the html layout. You can let the plugin order the comments by the orresponding post, or simply order them by date. The plugin can (optionally) separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the comments. It can ignore comments to certain categories, and it offers support for gravatars. It only gives extra work to the database, when actually a new comment arrived. You can filter out unwanted pingbacks, which originate from your own blog. And it is a widget.

Feature List

• The Pro version allows ordering by Comment Rating in the last X days on a sidebar. If you’re interested, please donate to get Comment Rating Widget Pro.
• Highly configurable via WordPress admin interface.
• Adjustable layout by macros.
• Handles trackbacks and comments in separate lists, or in one combined list.
• Widget support
• Caches the output
• Order comments by date, or by posting
• Support for Gravatars
• Option to exclude comments to posts in certain categories
• Doesn’t show pingbacks originating from own blog

You can download the latest version here.

Installation

1. After download the plug in, you can upload and install it from Wordpress Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New. Alternatively, you can unpack and upload the dir with files to the wp-content/plugins folder on your blog.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. You also need to install Comment Rating plugin version 2.9.0 or later. If the Comment Rating plugin is not present, this plug in will function exactly as “Get Recent Comment”.
4. Now you need to add the widget to your sidebar. Go to Appearance -> Widgets and drag the “Comment Rating Widget” the desired sidebar.
5. You can configure the options under Setting -> Comment Rating Widget. The default options should be good enough.
6. The comment rating and images on display can be “Likes only”, “Dislikes only”, or Both. This is customizable by the “Value for comment_karma” option in Comment Rating (under Advanced Option).

I have a keen interest in user dynamics.  That’s why I’m building Comment Rating with a passion.

I’m also very curious about how others use Comment Rating.  So I set up Google Alert to notify me when a Comment Rating site pops up.  Here’s a few of them which I consider most intriguing.  Hopefully this will help your brainstorm better ways to leverage your reader’s dynamics and create a popular site.

• CaptionWit.com. This is my own site created for the like-minded caption writers.  It’s also where Comment Rating was born.
• www.spartanburgspark.com. The site owner Steve Shanafelt made most interesting observations, quoted here.

In an attempt to address a point raised by one of the site’s visitors, I’ve decided to try out an additional level of comment moderation. As most of you already know, the Spark isn’t really “moderated” in a traditional sense, and we’ll allow pretty much any comment that’s not SPAM or blatant hate speech.

The reason for this is twofold: First, one of the site’s main goals is to provide a place where locally relevant conversations that aren’t happening (generally because no one else is talking about them) can actually take place, and heavy moderation of people who only agree with each other doesn’t really further that goal. Second, reading every single post before it goes up would be a huge drain on my time, which is better spent writing content for the site itself.

But what about opening up a form of moderation to the users? One where you could decide what’s good, what’s bad, and what really needs to be shut down to prevent the actual conversation from derailing. Well, now you can.

…

One thing to note: The intention of this plugin is to allow some user control over the other comments. In a very real way, voting “dislike” on certain posts is akin to shouting someone down in an argument. Use this power wisely.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that the author of the post on which the comment appears can’t be shouted down, nor can I as the site’s publisher (that’s right, you’re stuck with all of my comments).

• People of Walmart.com. This site has touched the hearts of a passionate crowd, a huge crowd.  Alexa ranking is 3349, and the site was only registered on Sept 1, 2009!   Users submit photos of scenes at Walmart.  Other users put in creative comments and voted by all readers.  Entirely automated by user-content and user moderation!

This list will grow.  Come back for more inspirations.

Please feel free to submit your sites if you think you have something unique.