Comments are an important part of most of the blogs. While you are the only person who can write blog posts, the visitors to your blog can add comments to your posts. This can fuel a sense of community within a blog, allow people to give you feedback on your writing, and give your visitors a way to help or talk to other visitors. The only downside of commenting is that unscrupulous people will try to misuse your blog’s ability to accept comments, and will try to post spam or advertisements in your blog instead of relevant comments. Luckily, the WordPress community is always developing more ways of fighting spam.

Adding a comment

If you look at the front page of your blog, you’ll see that every post has a link that says No Comments » at the bottom. Clicking on that link will take you to the bottom of the post page, which is where comments can be added:

If you’re logged into the WP Admin, you’ll see your name and a space where to write your comment. If you’re not logged in, you’ll see a comment form that any other visitor will see. This form includes fields to fill in for name, email, and website, along  with the commenting text area.

Once you type in the required information and click on the Submit Comment button, the comment will get entered into the WordPress database along with all of your other blog information. How soon it shows up on the site depends on your discussion settings.

Discussion settings

In the screenshot above, notice that Name and Mail are both marked as (required). As the owner of this blog, you can change the requirements for post comments. First, log in to the WP Admin and navigate to Settings | Discussion. The first box is the Default article settings in which we have options for allowing the comment box and trackback and pingbacks box. If you want either or both of these boxes to be unchecked by default, you can uncheck either or both of the boxes labeled Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) and Allow people to post comments on the article.

Submission, notification, and moderation settings

Let’s take a look at the next three boxes:

The boxes you check in these sections will determine how much moderation and checking a comment has to go through before it gets posted on the blog. In the screenshot we just saw, the settings shown are the default settings, which are pretty strict. The only way to make a more strictly controlled discussion on your blog is to check An administrator must always approve the comment. This option means that no matter what, all comments go into the moderation queue and do not show up on the site till you manually approve them.

Let’s look at the settings having to do with submission. These two options, which are in the Other comment settings box, control what the user has to do before he or she is even able to type in a comment:

• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail

  As you noticed in the screenshot in the Adding a comment section, Name and Mail are marked (required). If you leave this checked, then anyone posting a comment will encounter an error if they try to leave either of the fields blank. This doesn’t add a huge amount of security because robots know how to fill out a name and an email, and because anyone can put fake information in there. However, it does help your blog readers to keep a track of who is who if a long discussion develops, and it can slightly discourage the utterly impulsive commenting.

• Users must be registered and logged in to comment

  Most bloggers do not check this box because it means that only visitors who register for the blog can comment. Most bloggers don’t want random people registering, and most visitors don’t want to be compelled to register for your blog. If you check this box, there’s a good chance you’ll get no comments (which may be what you want). Or, if you’re setting up a blog for a closed community of people, this setting might be useful.

Now let’s look at the settings that have to do with moderation. These two options, which have to do with the circumstances that allow comments to appear on the site, are in the Before a comment appears box:

• An administrator must always approve the comment

  As I mentioned before, if this box is checked, every comment has to be manually approved by you before it appears on the site.

• Comment author must have a previously approved comment

  If you uncheck the box above this, but check this one, then you’ve relaxed your settings a little bit. This means that if the person commenting has commented before and had his or her comment approved, then the person’s future comments don’t have to be verified by you; they’ll just appear on the website immediately. The person just has to enter the same name and email as the previously approved comment.

Now let’s look at the settings that have to do with notification. These two options are in the Email me whenever box. These options are related to the circumstances of receiving an email notification about the comment activity.

• Anyone posts a comment

  This is generally a good setting to keep. You’ll get an email whenever anyone posts a comment—whether or not it needs to be moderated. This will make it easier for you to follow the discussion on your blog, and to be quickly aware of a comment that is not moderated and requires deletion.

• A comment is held for moderation

  If you’re not particularly interested in following every comment on your blog, you can uncheck the Anyone posts a comment checkbox and only leave this one checked. You won’t get an email about legitimate-looking comments that don’t appear to need moderation, but only those that need your approval.

The remaining settings, which are all in the Other comment settings box, have to do with comment display and are pretty self-explanatory. You won’t be able to see many of these settings in action until you have lots of comments.

When to moderate or blacklist a comment

If you scroll down the page a bit, you’ll see the Comment Moderation box:

This is an extension of the moderation settings from the top of the page. Note that if you’ve checked the An administrator must approve the comment checkbox, you can safely ignore this Comment Moderation box. Otherwise, you can use this box to help WordPress figure out which comments are probably OK and which might be spam or inappropriate for your blog. You can tell WordPress to suspect a comment if it has more than a certain number of links, as spam comments often are just a list of URLs.

The larger box is for you to enter suspect words and IP addresses:

• Here you can type words that are commonly found in spam (you can figure this out by looking in your junk mail in your email!), or just uncouth words in general.
• The IP addresses you will enter into this box would be those of any comments you’ve gotten in the past from someone who comments inappropriately or adds actual spam. Whenever WordPress receives a comment on your blog, it captures the IP address for you so that you’ll have them handy.

Scroll down a bit more and you’ll see the Comment Blacklist box:

Unlike the Comment Moderation box we just saw, which tells WordPress how to identify the comments to suspect, the Comment Blacklist box tells WordPress how to identify comments that are almost definitely bad. These comments won’t be added to the moderation queue and you won’t get an email about them; they’ll be marked right away as spam.

Avatar display settings

The final box on this page is the Avatars box:

An avatar is an image that is a person’s personal icon. Visitors who are very active on the Internet and comment frequently may have set up an avatar that they like to use. If so, it will show up on your blog if you leave the Show Avatars radio button checked.

The second box, Maximum Rating, will tell WordPress if it should not show avatars that have been rated too highly.

The third box, Default Avatar, tells WordPress what avatar to use for visitors who do not come with their own avatar. When you installed WordPress, it created a comment for you on the first post, and also created a default avatar for you. You can see the default avatar, Mystery Man, at use on the Hello World! post:

Moderating comments

Now that we’ve thoroughly explored the settings for which comments need to be moderated, let’s discuss what you actually need to do to moderate comments. Moderating means that you look over a comment that is in limbo and decide whether it’s good or bad. If it’s good, it gets to appear on the website; and if it is bad, it’s either marked as spam or is deleted and is never seen by anyone but you and the poster who wrote it.

To view comments waiting for moderation, log in to your WP Admin and navigate to Comments in the main menu.

If you have any comments waiting for moderation, there will be a little orange number in the main menu telling you how many comments await moderation.

This Edit Comments page is fully featured, just like the Edit Posts page. For each comment, you see the following information from left to right:

• Comment text, along with links to Approve it so that it shows up on the site, mark it as Spam, Delete it, Edit it, Quick Edit it, or Reply to it
• Commenter name, avatar, email address, and IP
• Comment submission time and date
• The title of the post on which the comment was made (which is also a link to edit that post), a number in parentheses indicating how many approved comments are already there on that post (which is also a link that will filter the comments list so that it shows only comments on this page), and a link to the post itself (indicated with a hash #)

Comments that are awaiting moderation have a yellow background.

You can click on the Quick Edit link for any post to open form fields right within this list. This will allow you to edit the text of the post and the commenter’s name, email, and URL.

You can use the links at the top—All, Pending, Approved, and Spam—to filter the list based on those statuses. You can also filter either only pings or comments with the Show all comment types pull-down filter menu. You can check one or more comments to apply any of the bulk actions available in the Bulk Actions menus at the top and bottom of the list.

Another quick way to get to this page, or to apply an action to a comment, is to use the links in the email WordPress sends you when a comment is held for moderation.

How to eliminate comment spam

Comment spam are comments that get posted on your blog that have spam content, just like spam email. If you’ve set up your moderation settings to be relatively secure, then these comments won’t appear on your blog. However, you may get dozens of email a day from WordPress asking you to moderate comments that it knows need moderation, but doesn’t know are spam.

The best tool available for eliminating comment spam from your blog is the Akismet plugin. This plugin, which comes (though inactive) with your WordPress installation, utilizes the Akismet spam-fighting service. Now, we’ll review how to get Akismet working on your blog. If your blog is built on WordPress.com, then Akismet is already activated by default on your blog.

Learning more
You can learn more about the Akismet spam-fighting service from http://akismet.com/.

Getting a WordPress.com API key

The Akismet plugin requires that you have a WordPress.com API key. To get one, you have to create an account at WordPress.com, even if you don’t have a blog there. Once your account is active, log in to WordPress.com and use the menu at the very top to go to your profile:

When you are on the Your Profile page, you’ll see your WordPress.com API key right at the top:

Select and copy that text. You may want to paste it into a text file to be sure you have it.

Activating Akismet 

Now go back to your WordPress installation and navigate to Plugins in the main menu:

You’ll see Akismet listed as the first plugin. Click on the Activate link. A yellow message bar will appear at the top of the page that says Akismet is almost ready. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter your API key you have copied from WordPress.com:

Paste your API key into the box. I suggest you also check the box below it about automatically discarding spam comments. Akismet is very good at identifying which comments are actually spam, and checking this box will make them disappear. However, if you’re concerned about Akismet misidentifying comments, leave this unchecked.

Now click on Update options>> and your blog is protected from comment spam!

Summary

In this article we saw how to change the default settings for comments and how to avoid spam comments using Akismet plugin that comes pre-installed with WordPress.