Comments are an essential part of every WordPress website to communicate with website visitors and other users. It allows to provide feedback or add inputs on any topic. The comments can be accepted by WordPress Posts, Pages and other post types. The comments are displayed by default on the Comments Page in your WordPress admin area. It is important to have your comments free of spam and allowed to display under the pages or posts it needs to appear. This article guides to configure and moderate comments.
Configuration Settings for Comments:
The comments displayed on the website depends upon your WordPress comment settings and the current theme. The configuration settings for the comments can be accessed through Settings > Discussion. It directly impacts the performance and appearance of comments on the website.
Comment Settings Options:
There are two major sections on this page. Options in these two sections could be enabled/disabled to change the appearance of the comments.
Other comment settings have the following options:
- Comment author must fill out a name and email
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment
- Automatically close comments on an article older than (number) days
- Enable threaded (nested) comments (number) level deep
- Break comments into pages with (number) top level comments per page and the (last) page displayed by default
- Comments should be displayed with the (older) comments at the top of each page
If the first option is enabled, then the user should provide the name and a valid email address along with the comment as a mandatory field. It will restrict any anonymous comments on the blog.
The second option makes the users register on the website before making a comment.
The third option makes the comments to be closed automatically after a preset number of days. It disables the comments on previously published articles and blog posts after the mentioned period.
The fourth option enables or disables the threaded comments on the blog post. In this, we can also specify the threads level on individual comments. But it may cause messy comment threads.
The fifth option can be enabled only if the particular post or blog attracts a huge number of comments. As this option allows to break comments into pages.
The sixth option makes the latest comments to have the highest priority. It reverses to show new comments on the top. As WordPress by default shows the new comments at the bottom only.
In addition to the above options, there are two more options such as “Email me whenever” and “Before a comment appears” needs to be enabled. Let us discuss these options briefly.
The option “E-mail me whenever” notifies you automatically when someone posts a comment or if a comment is held in moderation.
Another option ‘Before a comment appears‘ option helps to enable/disable comments whether they need to be manually approved or need to specify whether the comment author has approved the comment previously or not. If needed, you can uncheck the second option that approves the comments manually on your website.
Comment Moderation Tips:
The Comment Moderation helps to keep your website free from spam comments. These spam comments can be managed by approving the comments manually. If this option is enabled, all the website comments will fall in the moderation queue which helps to avoid the spam comments easily.
If the manual approval of comments is not allowed in your website, then you can simply set the number of links which can be allowed to comment on the website. If any comment exceeds the number of links, then it can be banned automatically. And also, you can set filters for IP addresses and email addresses which are not allowed to post comments on the website.
Avatars:
Avatars are the form of small images that appears beside the name of the commentator. WordPress uses Gravatar that allows the users to add specific avatar images for their profile.
If the user didn’t set any Avatar, WordPress sets a mystery man avatar automatically. So, it can be changed with a default Avatar from the list or you can add your own custom default gravatar.
We hope that this article will be useful for moderating and managing comments on your WordPress website. For more information, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and For video tutorials, subscribe to our YouTube channel ServerCake India.