Remove yourself from the top commentators list
Show top commentators is a wordpress plugin that highlights the commentators who frequently comment on your blog. It has been a great plugin to reward regular commentators since wordpress started adding nofollow to commentators website url in regular comments to thwart spammers.
Adding nofollow to links tells search engines that they should not be follow it as a part of a link from the current site. Techie Buzz does follow all your comments.
Coming back, even though show top commentators plugin allows you to reward regular commentators there are many a sites that I have come across that have the owner of the site featuring in the top commentators section.
Why does this happen?
This happens because many bloggers do not use the default admin user to write posts and comment on their blogs. They use their own users to do this. For example on my blog I use my personal user Keith to write posts and respond to comments using Better Comments Manager which allows me to reply to comments from within the admin panel.
By default Top Commentators ignores comments that are posted by the admin user. Any other user is always considered to be a top commentator.
Why you should do away with it?
Having yourself as a part of the top commentators section does not make sense since your linking to your own site. On the other hand you are also depriving a regular commentator a spot on that list.
How to remove yourself from the top commentators list?
It is a real simple task that you have to do in order to disallow yourself from showing up in the Top commentators list.
- Go to Wordpress Admin Panel.
- In that go to the Plugin menu.
- Select the Plugin Editor submenu.
- Choose Show Top Commentators from the list of plugins.
Once you are editing the plugin find the text filter_users, you will see something like this;
“filter_users” => “Administrator,admin”,
To disallow yourself from showing up in the top commentators just add your own username to this list
“filter_users” => “Administrator,admin,Keith Dsouza”,
In place of Keith Dsouza just add your own username. Once you have added this to the file, you will no longer show up in the top commentators section and give that spot to one of the other top commentators.
That’s the only step you need to do in order to remove yourself from the top commentators section. Do you feature in your top commentators section and have been looking for someway to get out? Do let me know through your valuable comments.
Shankar Ganesh
June 12th, 2007 at 8:00 pm #
Of late, I’ve been seeing on some blogs this kind of a thing - the blog author’s name itself appears in the list. Thanks for letting everyone know how to get rid of it.
Madhur Kapoor
June 13th, 2007 at 5:37 am #
Even i was doing this thing a few months back . but corrected it in time .
Nirmal
June 13th, 2007 at 5:39 am #
You are right, I too have seen blogs featuring author in the top commentators list. If you are using sidebar widget plugin for top commentator, its easy to remove as there is an option to exclude names.
Steve OMGtees
June 13th, 2007 at 7:08 am #
Nice tip - thanks. Must remember to do this when I get home. MUST remember.
keith
June 13th, 2007 at 7:49 am #
Hey Steve,
Glad you liked it.
Keith
keith
June 13th, 2007 at 7:49 am #
Thanks Nirmal for pointing that out.
keith
June 13th, 2007 at 7:50 am #
same here, i too didn’t realize it in the first place, but when i dug into the code i found it. Many people may not be aware of this that’s the reason i thought to write a post about it.
keith
June 13th, 2007 at 7:51 am #
Glad to do that Shankar.
pelf
June 13th, 2007 at 9:07 pm #
I did it without having to go down to the codes. There’s an option page to do it, no?
I loved the plug-in but I’m not using it at the moment because it clashes with my theme
Once the plug-in is activated, I can’t save the changes made to my sidebars (the changes won’t load).
keith
June 13th, 2007 at 9:13 pm #
Pelf this happens when you are using a theme that is sidebar ready and shows you an option to add plugins to the sidebar.
I faced this problem too when I was using a theme that supported plugins to be dragged and dropped but not widgets. After I dragged and dropped a widget nothing would work unless i deactivated the widget.
listikal
June 14th, 2007 at 9:29 am #
This is one thing I made sure I did right away when setting up Tom Commentators, but I do find it somewhat annoying when site owner names do populate into this field. Good tip.
keith
June 14th, 2007 at 1:22 pm #
Yup its a little annoying
Benedict Herold
June 15th, 2007 at 5:35 pm #
It would have been better if Top Commentators plugin had a option for adding the names to be excluded in from the options page rather than editing the plugin manually.
keith
June 16th, 2007 at 7:58 am #
Yup true
Shivaranjan
June 16th, 2007 at 6:34 pm #
Keith, Thanks for the tip. I was actually top commentor in my own blog
now I have removed myself. 
Garry Conn
June 17th, 2007 at 6:49 pm #
I remove my name from my top commenters list too… I would rather fill the space with an additional blogger who contributes.
Nice post Keith.
keith
June 17th, 2007 at 7:35 pm #
Thanks Garry glad it helped.
Ashish Saini (Ashfame)
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:39 pm #
i use the default admin account only but use ashfame as the display name and still i am on the top commentators list. In plugin editor, i can’t find any filter_users
pl help asap!
RJ
September 25th, 2007 at 5:36 am #
I had installed Top Commentators a few days back, but was not able to work out (didnt really give myself enough time, possibly - well! that’s my excuse, anyway!) how to get rid of my name from the list.
I have this ‘annoying’ habit of replying to each commentator (commentator or commenter!??) which would increase my comments count and keep me in a narcissistic 1st position!
Your detailed but easy ‘how-to’ came as a life-saver. There must be many in my position who were helped by this post. Thank you.
keith
September 25th, 2007 at 7:42 am #
@RJ Glad that you found this useful, that’s what Techie Buzz is all about making you know technology head on, and thanks for visiting I hope you will find more and more useful things from this site.
Jalaj
December 18th, 2007 at 6:16 am #
It also creates a bad impression that you are the only one who do most of the talking.