Change authors of comments
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I’ve just moved a WordPress.org blog to WordPress.com. The post authors were automatically changed to me on import; now that my co-authors are on WordPress.com, I’m going to change the authorship of their posts to their WordPress profiles.
How can I do the same for comments? Note that I don’t want just to change the name, email address, or URL associated with each comment – I want to link it to a WordPress profile.
(Of course, if the way to do this is to change the URL, I don’t mind doing that! The thing is that the end result I want is to link comments to WordPress profiles.)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Daniel,
When you visit your comments page here, you should see an “Edit” option under each comment:
https://valuingelectronicmusic.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php
From that screen, you should be able to change the name and email associated with a particular comment. Is that what you’re looking for?
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From that screen, you should be able to change the name and email associated with a particular comment. Is that what you’re looking for?
Thanks, but I’d already found that. The thing is, I don’t want to associate each comment with a particular name and email – I want to associate it with a WordPress profile (see paragraph 2 of my question).
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To put it another way: if what I have to do is to change the name and email, I want to know what I should change them TO in order to associate the comment with a WordPress profile so that e.g. the Gravatar will show up and the comment author name link will click through to the author page on the blog itself, as it would if the comment had been linked to a WordPress profile in the first place. This sort of retrofitting is easily done for posts, but I’m trying to find out how to do it for comments to.
all best
Daniel
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Hey Daniel,
Misunderstanding your question at first. Once a comment is in place, it isn’t possible to re-associate it with another Gravatar profile. When a comment is placed on your site, it is associated with a commenter ID, which generates the Gravatar photo. Changing the email address or the name on the comment will not change the Gravatar. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help!
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Hi Jeremy
Ah okay. Thanks. The thing is, these comments were imported from a WordPress.org blog. Is there any way of changing the commenter ID? Or is that fixed under the surface?
D
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Hey Daniel,
Great point! It looks like you can change the data of the XML file to change the comment author. For each comment, you’ll see the following lines within the XML file:
<wp:comment_author><![CDATA[AUTHOR NAME]]></wp:comment_author> <wp:comment_author_email>EMAIL</wp:comment_author_email> <wp:comment_author_url>WEBSITE URL</wp:comment_author_url>You can change the individual attributes to change the comment author. In your case, you would want to change the email address to the email that the users use with their Gravatar account (their WordPress.com email). Then, change the name to their name and the website URL to whatever you would like it to link to. Unfortunately, you would need to change this for every comment, which can get a bit tedious.
Great thinking though. Sorry that I missed that at first!
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Thanks Jeremey! Looks like that’s the answer to my problem. Luckily it’s quite a new site so there aren’t that many comments to change. But I guess that if there were more it would be worth doing a search-and-replace in a text editor.
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Great! I’m glad we found a workaround for this. Please let me know if you have any additional questions!
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