The Comment Subscribe checkbox allows a commenter to receive an email notification, when someone replies to the comment. This has multiple benefits:
- lets the reader know they have a reply
- confirms you're a human (not AI) and builds trust
- draws the reader back to the site (another pageview = revenue)
- returning visitors is a website quality signal that search engines use to rank websites
The end result is that your users have a better on site experience, you earn more revenue, and search engines detect that you run a high quality site because people come back to it.
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Website quality signal
In a lawsuit against Google recently, they were forced to reveal that on-site user behavior is one of many quality signal that they use to rank websites. User behavior tracking is built into many products including Chrome, Android, and likely gmail.
A user returning to a site is a quality signal that the reader finds the content valuable enough to revisit.
Enable
This is Enabled under the "Comments" section of the Feast Plugin Settings:
Once enabled, this adds a checkbox to your comment form that lets your readers receive replies to their comments:
Manage subscriber page
Once enabled, a new "Comment Subscriber" page is added Admin > Comments > Comment Subscribers.
Edit subscriber
There is an edit and delete link available to manage the subscribers.
Note: comment subscribers are only added to this database and are not added to any newsletter. Automatically subscribing people to a newsletter without explicit consent is a CANSPAM violation and may create email deliverability issues.
Newsletter
Commenters should not be automatically subscribed to a newsletter when leaving a comment.
However, getting permission to notify of them of a follow up comment means that you can add a call to action to sign up to your newsletter.
Email deliverability
Emails are sent from your server, and if emails aren't being sent, you'll want to contact your host to troubleshoot the cause and get their preferred method for improving email sending.
Honeypot
The honeypot checkbox is a field that's not visible to users, but will typically get auto-checked by spam bots.
If this field is checked, the comment and subscriber are silently discarded.
This is not a complete anti-spam solution and we recommend Antispam Bee for spam control.
Having Cloudflare Enterprise through service providers like BigScoots and NerdPress may further help manage spam.
Opting in existing commenters
We recommend against opting in existing comments because they haven't given explicit permission to contact them. This would be qualified as spam.
Settings
Settings can be found in Admin > Discussion > Feast Subscribe to Comments Settings
These will use our defaults and are optional to configure. If you want to customize this for your users, here are how they're used:
- Default Checkbox: if enabled, this will check the subscribe box by default - we do not recommend this, but it's available as an option
- Add a honeypot field: if enabled, this will add a hidden checkbox to the form and discard comments with the honeypot checked (only spambots will see and check this box)
- Subscribe Text Override: replaces the default "Send me an email notification when someone replies to my comment" text
- From email: which email the comment notification comes from
- From name: the name that appears on the email sent for notifications
- Subject: the subject, default is "New comment reply on post postname"
- Body: see below for default notification
- utm_tags: these are used for advanced tracking in Google Analytics and are beyond the scope of what we can support - only use this if you are already an expert at tracking email/campaign parameters - ignore this if you aren't already tagging traffic
Compatibility
This only works with the core WordPress comment system. It is not compatible with third party comment systems such as Discuz or Jetpack.