Publishing comments on your blog can either be a misery or a delight. The misery is if you are bombarded with spam and the delight is getting lots of wonderful comments you can accept and respond to accordingly.
Spam is a big issue and I shall be covering this in a later post, but today I’m talking about comments and how you can regulate them to manage them effectively within your own terms.
Collecting comments for consideration before you manually publish them on your blog is called moderation. Comments are also referred to as ‘discussions’ by WordPress, because essentially that is what they are: continuations of your online conversations (the content in your blog posts) in the form of feedback or responses.
It is important to regulate which comments are published, because you don’t want to unintentionally publish spam, as this can be detrimental to your blog or website. You should have the ability to choose which comments you want to publish, with the option to regulate how commenters leave their contributions or whether you accept any comments at all!
And of course I’ve provided you with some code you could paste into your own posts if you want to share this infographic with your readers. Remember to put it into the Text mode of your Edit Post page.
There are more things to take note of in the Settings > Discussions page and I have shown these in my latest post on the subject if you want to go into it in more depth, such as knowing how to whitelist or blacklist various elements of a comment to guard against spam, or regulate nested or threaded comment layout.
Controlling the comment settings in your blog will help you to keep a closer eye on what your readers are doing, and encourage a better class of contributions. After all, comments are seen by the search engines as extra content to index, not to mention more interesting stuff for your audience to read, so regulating how it is delivered and making it as easy as possible for people to leave feedback will result in a better blog and an even happier blogger!
I have lots of posts about comments on my own blog, which you could find via the search box in the sidebar – just type in ‘comments’ and peruse at your leisure! And don’t forget to leave your own comments below too…
About Alice Elliott
Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning blogging consultant who has been looking after bloggers since 2006! Woah, that's a long time! She specialises in "explaining things really simply" about WordPress, and has twice been noted as a top WordPress influencer for 2019.
Alice Elliott
Saturday 8th of February 2014
You're welcome, Tom, glad I was of help.
Tom @Ideas4Dads
Saturday 8th of February 2014
Thanks for this - as always really helpful :-) Take care Tom www.ideas4dads.net