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Alan ran a query on his blog’s database to peek at comment activity on his blog. I was curious, so ran the query here, too. The top 10 comment posters in 2008: (not counting the evil, evil spamroaches of course…)

1. dnorman: 353
2. Scott Leslie: 43
3. Jim: 39
4. David Esrati: 37
5. Alan Levine: 36
6. Chris L: 26
7. Sami: 22
8. Rob Wall: 22
9. Brian: 16
10. Cole: 16

I’ve got a prof using a WordPress site to manage some really active discussions in his course. He’d really like to be able to list all comments posted by each user, as part of the assessment rubric for the course.

I’ve found LOTS of “recent comments” and “popular posts” plugins, and some requests for similar “list all comments for a given user” functionality, but haven’t been able to find anything that fits the bill.

Ideally, the solution would list all contributors to a blog (everyone with accounts), with links to a page (or pages) that lists all of their posts, their pages, and comments.

Any suggestions? Do I get to write another plugin?

I've been off-blog for a few days, and haven't had a chance to deal with this yet. I received a couple of email from folks saying they were having difficulty commenting on my blog. I thought maybe Akismet might be blocking them, so I've just switched back to a Drupal 5 development snapshot of Spam.module. Yes, it's a continuing ongoing saga of switching back and forth between Akismet and Spam.module. Hopefully this solves the comment problem without subjecting this blog to a torrential spamstorm.

Akismet is nice, with its distributed spam blocking algorithm (hey! I sound like the schlub on Numb3rs!) but it's essentially a black box – if something goes south, there's no way to fix it from my side of the fence. Spam.module lets me tweak as needed.

Update: It took 7 hours for the first spam to sneak through. Frakking spammers. Time to re-tweak the Spam.module custom rules…

Thanks to some great work by Christoph C. Cemper, there is now a module available to enable email notifications for comments by anonymous users (which, on my blog, is everyone but myself) on a Drupal blog. There should now be a “follow comments by email” checkbox underneath the comment submission form, which adds the much-missed feature.

It needs a (minor?) change to the stock comment.module, but Christoph provides a modified version of that. Hopefully the changes aren’t drastic enough to make upgrading Drupal less straightforward.

Thanks to Christoph for his quick work on this (he started on it last night, and has a usable module available before noon today!) I owe you a beer or two for this!