As I already announced in my previous post, I sat down and rewrote the Show Top Commentators-Plugin by Nate Sanden to make it a fully configurable Sidebar Widget.

As of now I publish this Sidebar Widget for common public use, since the code it is based upon has been published under GPL license as well

DOWNLOAD WIDGET

The zip file contains a README which includes the installation instructions, but as always concerning Sidebar Widgets, it is pretty easy. Here you can see a screenshot demonstrating both the option panel of the Widget and useful presets for the different options:

Here’s a brief description of all options:

• Widget title
  Your Widget should have a title which is shown in your sidebar.
• Reset
  The statistics are reset automatically; by default the reset happens each week, but you may choose between hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis to reset the stats. If you do not want to reset at all, just choose the “all” option. Note: Using a larger time interval may result in the effect that some trolly people start spamming your blog to receive a backlink for a long period of time from your blog.
• Number of Commenters
  How many commentators should be visible in the top commentators list?
• Filter user names
  You usually do not want to be counted as a commentator for yourself, so you usually filter Administrator or admin or your own username on your blog.
• Filter user IDs
  If you prefer filtering by userid rather than adding the usernames to be filtered, you may choose this option instead.
• Filter user URLs
  If you just want to block some certain URLs in the list, here’s your chance to do so.
• Define your ‘none’ text
  As long as thete’s no new comment after a reset has happened, the text configured here will be shonw in your sidebar.
• Link to users’ URLs
  You may get rid of the spammer prblem at all, if you disable linking to your commentators’ homepages.
• Show comments amount per user
  You may choose to display the amount of comments a particular user has posted since the last reset of the statistics.
• Name length limit
  Long usernames tend to break the layout of the sidebar, so this is your option to choose how many characters of the username should be used before abbreviating the name.

Have fun with this widget! Your comments and feedback are appreciated as always, as well as a little donation to honor my work.