Basic WordPress training: Managing comments on your blog
The best blogs have thriving conversations in the comments section of their posts. It’s a brilliant way of communicating with potential customers and clients, but a little bit of maintenance is required to keep on top the comments you receive.
Here I’ll show you how to manage comments and use some moderation tools within WordPress to ensure things don’t get out of control.
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Types of comments
There are two main types of comments:
- Comments left by your visitors after they’ve read a blog post
- Pingbacks and trackbacks – These are notifications that you’ve been linked to from another site. This can be a positive thing; people like what you’re saying so much they want to link to it. Or it could be spam! Spammers use trackbacks as a means of slipping in links to comments so that sometimes you end up linking back to a totally unrelated website . Never fear, you can manage and prevent this within WordPress.
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Before we get into using the Comment moderation tools to control which comments, trackbacks and ping backs appear on the live site, let’s take a look at comment status.
Comments fall into four statuses:
- Approved – meaning you have given it the go-ahead to appear on your blog post
- Pending – meaning it is being held by WordPress prior to being given the go ahead by the site administrator (you!)
- Spam – these are comments that have been determined as not genuine
- Trash – comments you’ve deleted
When you log in to WordPress you’ll see your most recent comments on your dashboard (as long as they are enabled in your Screen Options). A red strip next to the comment indicates it is pending approval.
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You can actually change the status of the comment in your dashboard by hovering over it and clicking on the appropriate option. If it is a genuine comment from a real person, you’ll want to click ‘Approve’ and maybe ‘Reply’ to join in the conversation. If it is clearly unrelated you’ll want to mark it as ‘Spam’.
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To see all of your comments click on ‘Comments’ (the number in the orange circle tells you how many comments are pending approval).
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Exactly as with Posts and Pages, you can filter the comments according to their status. So to see all of the pending comments, click on ‘Pending’.
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If you deem a comment to be spam it will be moved to the Spam list. The comments build up in this list, so it’s a good idea to empty the Spam once in a while. To do this, click on the Spam filter link. Then click ‘Empty Spam’.
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Settings to control comments
Let’s take a look at the settings that control what actually makes it into your list of comments. The main thing you need to understand is that you are entirely in control of comments if you get your settings right. If you don’t get them right, you could be inundated with spam!
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There are two ways to control comments:
- Individually on posts and pages
- In the discussion settings
Let’s explore the first way.
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Controlling comments on posts and pages
In the edit screen for a post or page, there is a Discussion block – it is somewhere below the Visual Editor (depending on which Screen Options you have turned on).
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In the Discussion block you can choose to allow comments or trackback and ping backs by checking the boxes. Uncheck them if you don’t want comments, trackbacks or ping backs on a particular post.
Below the Discussion block, you will see a Comments block. Here you can moderate or reply to the comments left on this particular post or page.
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Discussion settings
Now let’s take a look at the settings that effect your entire site as regards comments. Go to Settings>Discussion.
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There are a lot of options on this page and they interact differently depending on which combination is checked. Let’s take a look at the most important options.
The top group covers the default article settings. These are a personal choice, but there is absolutely no harm in having them all checked. If you don’t want any comments left on your site at all, uncheck the third option.
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The second group of options are miscellaneous comment settings. It’s a good idea to check the first option – this states that it is compulsory for the author of a comment to leave a name and email address. You can also control if you’d like comments to be disallowed after a post has been published for a certain amount of time; this can be useful for extremely time sensitive material.
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The third group covers how you are informed about comments. You can check the first box to receive an email notification whenever someone leaves a comment.
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The fourth group controls permissions for publication of comments. If you’d like to manually approve every single comment, check the first box. If you are happy to auto-approve comments by authors who have commented on previous posts, check the second box.
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Once you’ve made changes, don’t forget to click ‘Save Changes’.
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So now you have a basic overview and understanding of the most important comment moderation settings.
There is an essential plug-in called Akismet that will dramatically reduce the amount of spam that will ever make it through to moderation. I’ll explain more about this and a couple of other plug-ins I recommend in the next tutorial.
