How To Make A Comment And Manage Wordpress Comments

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This tutorial shows how comments are made on Wordpress posts and how you can manage them from within the Administrators Dashboard area.

Managing Comments Is A Very Important Task!

One of the major things that differentiates a blog from a traditional website is the fact that anyone can leave a comment on every blog post you make, and pages as well, depending on how you set things up in your Wordpress settings.

It is always good to set comments on as it will help get reactions and feedback from your readers to your posts and gets a conversation going. This can lead to healthy discussion and helps create a sense of community around your blog, which is great for getting readers to return and therefore make your blog more successful.

Unfortunately there are a lot of spammers on the internet who will use any means, including automated ones, to leave comments on your blog to gain backlinks to their own websites.

Comment spam can mean you get a whole bunch of useless comments you don’t need, but which you still have to manage.

Fortunately Wordpress is great at helping you manage your post comments with several different Discussion options in the Settings area on the admin area. There are also plugins you can use to help you with this task when it comes to fighting comment spam. Akismet is the best example of this as it is provided as default with your Wordpress installation.

What Is A Wordpress Post Comment ?

At the end of every post you make on your Wordpress website or blog you will normally see an area displayed for reader to leave a comment or message about your post. A comment box will normally look something like this and start with the words “Leave A Reply“:

If a visitor to your blog posts wishes to leave a comment they must first enter their name and their email address. Both these fields are required! They can also enter their website address if they want to. Then they can enter there comment text or message. Finally they must click the Submit Comment button to complete the process.

In most cases the visitor will then see a message that says “Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation” and this just means that you, as owner of the blog, have setup up the Discussion Settings so that you must approve blog posts before they appear below the post commented on.

How Are Wordpress Comments Controlled?

Comments and the way they work on your blog is controlled by the options you select in the Discussion settings from the admin dashboard Settings menu option.

Click on the Discussion option in the Settings drop down list to display the Discussion Settings page:

This page lists the default settings for comments on blog posts, but they can be changed on an individual post if you need to.

The page displayed above shows the default settings currently in use for this blog and most of them are self-explanatory. Further details and discussion on these fill follow later.

How Are Wordpress Comments Managed?

The comments already submitted to your blog posts are managed by using the Comments page, which you can select from the Menu options in the admin dashboard.

You may see a number in red that tells the number of comments pending and awaiting moderation by you. Click on the Comments option to display the Edit Comments page.

This page will list all the comments on your site and you can select which ones you want to view:

The page image above is displaying the pending comments awaiting moderation. You can also select all, approved or spam comments instead if you want.

If you move your mouse to hover over the actual text in a comment you will see the following option links appear below the text area:

Approve | Spam | Delete | Edit | Quick Edit | Reply

This gives you a quick way to make a decision on individual post and take the appropriate action for that individual post. Using this approach you can approve the comment, mark it as spam, delete it, edit it, do a quick edit or reply to the comment.

Alternatively you can click on the check box to the left of each comment and use the Bulk Actions drop down list to apply the same action to several comments all at the same time.

If you choose to edit an individual comment you will see the following page displayed:

Here you will be able to change any part of the comment that your visitor has left for you, including their name, email and web address as well as the comment itself. From here you can also select to approve to comment or mark it as spam.

As you can see managing the comments on your posts in Wordpress is very easy.

The biggest problem is likely to be with the volume of spam comments you will get, but with the Akismet spam filtering plugin this issue is made a lot easier too. More on Akismet later…

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