Comments are a great way to receive useful feedback on your blog’s content. You will also be able to respond to comments to get involved with your audience, and this is great for marketing your blog and building up your readership. Unfortunately, spam and trolling can become a major problem, particularly on more popular blogs which receive a large number of daily visitors. While most spam comments are automatically filtered out by the Akismet plugin, which is installed and activated by default on the WordPress platform, some do still get through. There may also be the occasional offensive comment which will likely not be filtered by the plugin. For these reasons, blog administrators will need to moderate reader comments before they appear on the site, and although you can turn this feature off, it is generally not advisable to do so. The following guide explains how to moderate and publish reader comments.
Moderating Comments
- Log in to your WordPress administrator dashboard and open the Comments section from the sidebar.
- Click on the “Pending” link at the top of the page. This will filter the list of reader comments to show only those which are still awaiting moderation before they can be displayed live on your blog. When a reader posts a new comment, you should be alerted by email by default.
- Move your mouse cursor over the comment to display a list of options. Click “Approve” to approve it or to put it into the Spam or Trash folders. You can also edit comments before approving them by clicking the appropriate link.
Replying to Comments
You can also reply to your approved comments at any time you want. You can even use this feature to start a public conversation in the comments section of the relevant post or page.
- Return to the Comments page and click “Approved”.
- Move the mouse cursor over the comment and click “Reply”. Enter the text and click “Reply”. Your replies may also include HTML code or links to other pages or websites.
- If you decide to remove a comment, click “Unapprove”.
Disabling Comments for Specific Pages or Posts
You can also disable comments for specific pages and/or posts. For example, you will probably want to disable comments for pages such as your about or contacts pages.
- Either open the “Posts” or “Pages” section from the sidebar on your administrator dashboard depending on what you want to disable comments for.
- Select the posts or pages from the list for which you want to disable comments and choose “Edit” from the dropdown list entitled “Bulk Actions”.
- Choose “Do not allow” from the dropdown box beside “Comments” and click “Update”.
