Managing Comments in a WordPress Site.
Comments allow people to respond to your blog entries, and increase collaborative interaction between you and your readers. They are also a source of pain from trolls and spammers who like to hijack anything for their monetarily corrupt reasons.
Global Management
Comments are managed globally under Settings within your admin Dashboard.
1. http://mydomain.mindwatering.net/wp-admin/
2. On the left menu of your Dashboard, expand the Settings section, and click Discussion. This displays the Discussion Settings page.
There are multiple global settings on this Discussion Settings page.
a. Default article settings:
The most important is: "Allow people to post comments on new articles". This checkbox is under the top section, "Default article settings".
Without this option, comments are globally disabled. You can still disable comments on each article page.
b. Other Comment Settings
Below the Default article settings section is the "Other comment settings", where a lot of tweaking can be done.
- Comment author must fill out name and email
Do not think of this as any kind of security measure, names and e-mails can be forged / entered by anyone. It's simply a way for you to possible contact the person back who leaves a comment.
All this does is make those two fields of the comment form required.
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment
This option allows you to solve the troll / spammer problem because your readers would each have account, authenticate, and you'd know who added a comment. Using this option is not typical however, because of the additional overhead in time managing a reader / user list.
- Automatically close comments on articles older than 30 days
The 30 days is default and can be changed. This is a very useful option to keep discussions on on topics restricted to just the most recent posts. This is helpful if you wish to control when your topics are discussed and not side-track discussions to old topics which might be not relevant anymore.
- Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels deep
The 5 levels is default and can be changed. This option allows you and others commenting to be able to track a conversation within the comments on the page. This is very useful to keep responses in the chains of conversation especially if multiple chains / conversations are going a the same time.
- Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default
The 50 top level comments is a default. This allows a very popular thread to display with the most recent 50 top level comments for everyone to see and continue discussing.
- Comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of the page.
The default of older can be changed to reverse the sort to newest first. This option allows you to resort so that the newer comments are first instead of on the last page. Use with the above option to automatically show the first page instead.
c. The other sections . . .
The Email me whenever section performs notifications for new and held posts. For this to work, you have to set-up the mail server relay settings in the General section.
The Before a comment appears section has two checkbox options.
- The first option sets that all comments must be manually approved before being added to the blog page. The plus to enabling this is that trolls and spammers have no satisfaction. The minus to enabling is that real users have to wait for approval to be able to discuss anything, you have to baby sit the comments.
- The second option option is similar but once a person has one approved, they can continue posting comments with the subsequent ones automatically approved. This option is a good compromise so that only first responses / comments have to be reviewed first.
The Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist section allows you to flag options if there are 2 or more hyperlinks (which is why the trolls and the spammers now list just one link per comment). The default 2 can be changed, as well. But it is mostly useless. There is also a large "body" field which allows you enter phrase keywords to automatically flag posts. This option can be somewhat useful for the less than creative spammers and trolls who are lazy. The other large "body" field for Blacklist is used so that phrases and words entered in the comment block the comment immediately.
Reviewing Comments:
You can view comments two ways. You can view just one Post's comments by view the Post and scrolling down to the bottom to the comments section. You can view all comments together in the Comments view.
This view is mostly useful to locate an offensive one to delete and to approve those pending approval.
To get to the comments view, from the main Dashboard page, choose Comments on the left-hand menu.
The view has several nice filters.
- Click Pending to see comments needing moderation approval.
- Change "All Comment Types" dropdown to show just comments or pings. Pings are the ping backs that one blog site can give/send or get/receive from another blog site to know that someone is linking to your posts.
- The Trash filter shows you comments you have moved to Trash from the other All, Pending, and Approved views. Use this filter to get to the button to Empty Trash to remove all the test or bad comments you wish to finally delete.
Single Post Restriction of Comments:
This is a confusing thing, because when you view your posts, you can see a button, where you can add a comment, but there might not be a button / option to disable comments on the post. If you have this problem, to see the option, you have "Quick Edit" the page. Once you do that, you can then disable comments on that specific post, and save the change.
The determination of whether or you can see the option to disable comments w/o being in Quick Edit mode depends on whether the Discussion widget is appearing / enabled in the theme you have installed. So the end result is that when you are looking at a post, and you don't see a way to disable comments, click the Quick Edit button, and then disable it.
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