In wordpress there is a way to separate the comments your blog receives in two categories: trackbacks/pingbacks and actual comments. I'm wondering if there is a way to divide the comments in more categories: for example comments from friends or comments from popular blogs, etc. In mininova.org they have separated the comments in actual comments and thanks comments. Is there a way to do that in wordpress? Any ideas?
There is no plugin to do that yet... but thats a good idea... however it will be a tedious job with lots of repeat error stuff as if you think of it... the ways it can be separated is either by number of lines, contents in the comment, number of words, ip address, email address, name of comment poster etc. For each of them a value has to be assigned, which will take wayyyyyyyy much work for any plugin developer... try paged comments instead if you have lots of comment coming to each of your post. Cheers amigo!
I think that any method that relies on searching the comment text is doomed to fail. Im not a plugin developer however I don't think that building a thank you plugin would be too difficult. You would need to create a seperate 'thanks' table in the database so that someone can just click to say thanks instead of leaving a comment. For example, you could have the regular comment area but instead of typing in something in the text area the user could click a 'thumbs up'. At the end of the post there would be a list of thank yous to the people who clicked the thumbs up and there would be links to their websites. Of course, there's a good chance people would abuse this and thank every post of yours to get a link to their blog!