Show top commentators ^[1] 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 ^[2].

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 ^[3] 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.

1. Go to WordPress Admin Panel.
2. In that go to the Plugin menu.
3. Select the Plugin Editor submenu.
4. 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.