Plugin to force unique comment author names?

While I don’t think this is a good idea – you *could* :
– manually display:none on the name field from the comment form
– add a custom field called Name2, and add a hook to say it needs to be unique :
https://wpengineer.com/2214/adding-input-fields-to-the-comment-form/
.. $unique = false ...

But – it would be better for the user to know if the name has been taken using Ajax in real-time rather than after they have submitted the form.

I’m not sure how you’re going to avoid this being super annoying for your commenters.

That said, there is a plugin Ajax-ify the comment form, and there are detailed articles as well :
https://en-ca.www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-ajaxify-comments/
https://rudrastyh.com/wordpress/ajax-comments.html

Thank you @corrinarusso for thinking about my question and for your suggestions.

I understood the first idea with the 2nd name field – however I’m afraid to create a lot of problems with other plugins, which are based on the “normal” author name.

And furthermore this idea seems to require some programming knowledge, which I don’t have. This is even more true for the second idea, which I completely did not understand. ??

I was looking more for a “ready” solution, which doesn’t require more knowledge than installing and setting up a plugin. ??

In my opinion the requirement for a comment author’s name to be unique should be a WP core functionality, because I think, all those millions of WP-Websites which are using comments and get some feedback will face the problem with ambiguous user names. What do all these admins do?
This is also a question of data security or data privacy: Without a solution for this problem it is very easy to “steal” somebodys username and write comments with his name.

Hi @tooni
> I was looking more for a “ready” solution,
> which doesn’t require more knowledge than installing and setting up a plugin.

There is no ready solution, bc it’s a really bad idea.

> will face the problem with ambiguous user names. What do all these admins do?

What do admins do about *what* ?
What is the problem you are trying to solve?

If you need to reach out to your users for some reason, then require a login to comment. If you don’t want people to have to login to comment, then you’ll need to let them comment in any way.

>There is no ready solution, bc it’s a really bad idea.

Why do you classify my question as a “really bad idea”?

Can you imagine how you feel when you join a discussion in the comment area of a website and some days (or weeks) later somebody posts a complete nonsense comment with your name?
I think you would be very angry about the other person and about the website’s admin, because he didn’t take care to avoid this.
The admin can avoid this only by very carefully moderating users and comments. He would have to manually check for existing names. This means an enormously effort and could be done very easily by software.

So, I think: It’s a really good idea to have something like a plugin (or a core functionality) which enforces unique comment author names.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Tooni.

Okay – but,

If you are not requiring that users need to login, or register, or even validate their comment, then what’s preventing me from posting comments on your site using the name Tooni? or Tom, or Mike or whoever.
1. the real Mike comments on your post, and you approve.
2. The next day, I comment on your post posing as Mike.
How will you know the difference if it’s not being validated?

> How will you know the difference if it’s not being validated?

Half of the validation is already done by core functions of WP:
When there is an already approved comment with the same author’s name AND email-address, a new comment will be approved automatically. When the combination of name and email is not known, the admin will be asked for the approvement.

And I think this process should be easily extendend in a way, that if the combination of name and email are new but the name was already used before to ask the comment author to select another name.
This is what I do today manually. However, I do not ask to select a different name. Instead I modify the name by adding some more characters or numbers before approving the comment, like Mike-B oder Tom-17.
But of course, this is only possible if I remember that there was another Mike or Tom before. And because I cannot remember several thousand names, I have to search for them. And as I said, this is too much effort and could be easily done by software.