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.
My comments are not hiding when the “poorly rated comments” value is reached – only the style gets applied. Anything I need to do in the template?
Well all comments are equal. But some comments are more equal than others. Comments made by the blog post author or admin will never be hidden. All other comments will be hidden when they reach the poorly rated threshold.
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.
. If it works this would be exactly what...