CommentAura

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. CommentAura ships no JavaScript at all — reading, posting, editing, voting and reacting are all plain form submissions.

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

• 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 and reactions, 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 → Tools:

• 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.

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.

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