Introduction:
WordPress holds a built-in comment system that permits for community interaction around your content. Comment Moderation is a feature available in WordPress that allows you to prevent the comments appearing on the websites without your approval or blog administrator.
Comments:
It permits website visitors to communicate with readers. It provides a facility to add input on a specific article to ask questions and provide feedback.
On WordPress sites, a user with a valid Name and Email can send a comment without verifying their identity. By default, comments are turned on based on the theme, there will be a comment form showed at the bottom of every post and page of the website.
If anyone submits a comment, it will be held for moderation for you to approve or delete. This allows you to control what appears on your website.
Comments Moderation:
If we click on the comments menu, the comments are shown on the WordPress website.
Comments page holds four different tabs such as all comments, pending, approved, spam and trash.
Comments to be approved will be shown under the Pending tab.
To approve a comment click on comment, and see action links that appear below. To make comment visible on the website, Click on Approve. Reply to the comment with the help of the reply link. When we reply to comment, it will approve comments automatically.
If a comment looks spammy, mark it as Spam.
There are various indicators to define on a comment whether it is spam or not:
Comments with a group of links, keywords, and strange characters – This is the distinct type of spam comment, and should not contain a hard time telling it apart from a real comment.
Comment with a Fake Name – When a comment is posted by the person being left named “Best Mortgage Rates” or “Cheap Printer Ink”, then it is called as a marketer trying to spam your site for a backlink.
Generic Comments – To bypass the spam filter, the spammers reply to generic comments. It seems to be “Thank You”, “Really Nice Article”, or insert title of your post and make a generic statement
WordPress arrives pre-installed with Akismet, though we have to activate the plugin and signup for anti-spam service to reduce spam.
When a comment is marked as spam, Akismet will learn to catch similar comments. The spam comments will appear under the spam tab. No need to visit this tab that often. However, when the user complaints that their comments are not showing on your website, then this is the first place you should watch. When a comment is wrongly noted as spam, then simply click on Not Spam link to move it from spam to pending.
If you get hundreds of spam comments appearing in the Pending, then move on to spam tab and click on check for spam button. It triggers a spam check on existing comments on the website and Akismet will shift spam comments from Pending to Spam.
Delete all spam comments by click on the empty spam button. Otherwise, it will be automatically deleted after 15 days by WordPress. When we delete thousands of comments at once, it will slow down the speed of the website.
We can remove a comment without marking it as spam, just click on the Trash link. Trash contains deleted comments and will automatically delete after 30 days. If we want to retrieve the deleted comment, we can restore it from Trash within 30 days.
Comments for all posts and pages are shown in the comment moderation area. Users can individually view the comments by either visiting that post on your site or through your admin area.
How to view comments for a single post:
Users can see all approved and pending comments by opening it in the post editor. To open the post-tap on Posts » All Posts and choose the Edit link option in the post editor screen. On the post editor screen scroll down to the bottom, and it shows all comments created for the post.
It is possible to edit, delete, reply and moderate comments directly from here. If the user didn’t see the comments under the post editor, from the top right corner of the screen click on the Screen Options button. It shows a fly down menu where the user to check the box next to Comments. Then simply scroll down, and see comments for that post under the post editor.
Turn Comments On/Off for Posts:
If the user doesn’t want to be enabled, WordPress permits to turn comments off. Edit a post and on the post editor screen and scroll down to the Discussion meta box. Here uncheck the box next to ‘Allow comments’ option.
If there is no discussion meta box on the post editing screen, then click on the Screen Options button at the top-right corner of the screen. This will display a fly down menu to check the box next to the discussion. After that scroll down and there is a discussion meta box under the post editor.
Third-Party Comments:
Several third-party commenting foundations were introduced for WordPress. Each foundation has its moderation interface and technology.
We hope that this article will be helpful to moderate comments in WordPress. For more information, like us on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. For video tutorials, subscribe to our YouTube channel “ServerCake India”.