CommentAura

Description

CommentAura turns the native WordPress comment section into a modern discussion experience, without taking your data hostage.

Everything is stored in wp_comments and wp_commentmeta, exactly where WordPress puts it. Deactivate CommentAura and every comment, every reply, and every permalink still works. That is not a migration path — it is the architecture.

Built on three promises

1. Zero lock-in. Your comments are native WordPress comments. No iframe, no external service, no account for your visitors, no export step if you leave. Uninstalling removes CommentAura’s own data and never touches a single comment.

2. It works without JavaScript. The comment thread is rendered on the server, in your page’s HTML. Search engines index it. Readers with slow connections see it. Screen readers read it. Reading, posting, editing, voting and reacting all work as plain form submissions. JavaScript only makes them faster: a half-kilobyte script loads with the page, and the rest — including WordPress’s own React library — loads only when a reader scrolls near the comments. You can switch it off in Settings.

3. No ads, no trackers, no third-party requests. CommentAura sends nothing to anyone. There is no analytics beacon, no CDN call, no « sponsored » content injected into your discussions.

What you get

• A comment section that feels familiar — soft comment bubbles, a quiet Like · Reply · time row, Top / Newest / Oldest sorting, and a « ⋯ » menu that keeps moderator tools out of readers’ way
• 3D reactions people already know: Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry by default. Rest on Like, long-press on a phone, or use the keyboard. Choose which of 16 faces appear, their order, their names and their icons — or add your own
• Threaded discussions that work with both classic themes and block/full-site-editing themes
• Comment subscriptions with proper double opt-in — nobody is emailed until they confirm, and every notification carries a one-click unsubscribe
• Voting, one switch away in Settings, with duplicate prevention enforced by the database rather than hopeful bookkeeping
• Comment editing for a configurable window, with every revision retained so moderators can always see what a comment used to say
• Pinned comments and per-post discussion closing
• A spam baseline — honeypot and timing checks, no CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs tax every honest reader to inconvenience a bot that can solve them for a fraction of a cent. Works alongside Akismet if you use it.
• Rate limiting that does not punish shared networks. WordPress core matches floods on IP or email, so two unrelated visitors behind one office or mobile network block each other. CommentAura keys on identity and address together.
• Full GDPR support — registered with WordPress’s own personal-data exporter and eraser.
• Privacy by construction — guest identities are stored as a one-way salted hash, never as a raw IP address.

Moving in, and moving out

Under CommentAura → Import / Export:

• Import from Disqus. Point it at a Disqus export file. Threads are matched to your posts by URL — including your old domain, since a move away from Disqus usually follows a domain change — and a discussion that cannot be matched is skipped rather than attached to the wrong post. Re-running the same file imports nothing twice.
• Dry run first, always. Every import previews exactly what it would do before anything is written. That is the default.
• Switch from another comment plugin. Your comments need no migration at all — wpDiscuz, Jetpack Comments and Subscribe to Comments Reloaded all store them in wp_comments already, which is where CommentAura reads from. What those plugins keep in their own tables is the material around the comments, so CommentAura brings across the part that would otherwise be lost: subscriber lists and votes. Nothing is deleted from the other plugin, and running it twice does not double anything.
• Export every comment as JSON, streamed in batches so the size of your site does not decide whether the export finishes.

Note that Disqus exports produced since 2019 contain no email addresses and no IP addresses for guest commenters. CommentAura preserves the display name, imports with an empty address, and tells you how many were affected rather than letting you find out from a support ticket.

Performance

A page with CommentAura active but no comment thread loads zero CommentAura assets. Not a small file — none.

A page with a thread loads about 10 KB (compressed) until a reader reaches the comments. Everything CommentAura itself ships comes to about 19 KB. WordPress’s own React library, which the interactive parts use, loads only when the comments come into view. Reaction faces are small images, about 1 KB each, loaded only when they are shown.

Rendering a thread costs a fixed number of database queries regardless of how many comments a post has, because replies are fetched per level rather than per comment. A post with 10 comments and a post with 10,000 cost the same.

Credits

The reaction faces are Fluent Emoji by Microsoft (https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui-emoji), used under the MIT licence. The licence ships with the plugin in assets/reactions/LICENSE.txt. The faces are bundled inside the plugin; nothing is loaded from Microsoft or anyone else.

Developer friendly

• A documented REST API under commentaura/v1
• Every template is an overridable partial you can copy into your theme
• Named callbacks throughout, so hooks can actually be removed
• PSR-4, PHP 8.1+, strict types, PHPStan level 8
• The readable source of every script ships in assets/src, next to its build in assets/build

Source code

The scripts in assets/build are compiled from assets/src with @wordpress/scripts 30, using the webpack.config.js included in the plugin. To rebuild them, run npm install @wordpress/scripts@30 and then npx wp-scripts build in the plugin folder.

Optional paid add-on

Everything described on this page is free and stays free. A separate paid plugin, CommentAura Pro, sold at https://waafaa.com/product/commentaura/, adds tools for the people who run the discussion: a moderation queue, rules, AI triage and analytics. It is never needed to use anything in this plugin.