Modern day websites, primarily blogs should be interactive. Your viewers should be able to give feedback to you about your article, product or service. Commenting system adds interactivity in WordPress websites. WordPress has very powerful commenting system with multi-level threaded comments. It’s ability to manage the commenting system is remarkable. Commenting system can be managed from discussion settings in WordPress website. In this tutorial, we are going to learn about the discussion settings in detail.
First of all, let’s enter into the discussion settings of WordPress Dashboard.
Step 1:
Log in to the WordPress Dashboard. Click on the Settings >> Discussion menu.
Step 2:
You will reach to the Discussion Settings page.
In the Default article settings, you’ve 3 settings with checkbox:
- Attempt to notify any blogs links to from the article
This is setting is checked by default. This setting sends the notification to the blogs (using WordPress) when you put their link in your article. If you are doing link sharing with other bloggers or webmasters, this notification certainly becomes very important. - Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles
When other blogs put links of your blog in their article, you need to be notified about it. This setting enables to receive such notification. This setting is checked by default. - Allow people to post comments on new articles
This setting controls if you would like to allow people to post comments on your blog or website or not. It’s global setting for your site. Each post also has such setting which overrides this global setting.
Step 3:
Next, you’ve ‘Other comment settings’ with 5 settings:
- Comment author must fill out name and email
This setting is checked by default. On being checked, it forces comment author to fill out their name and email. - Users must be registered and logged in to comment
This is unchecked by default. If you want your commenter to register on your blog/website compulsorily to be able to comment, you can check this option. - Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 days
This is also unchecked by default. Check it if you want to close comments after certain days of publishing the articles. - Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 level deep
It is checked by default. It allows multilevel threaded comments up to 5 level by default. If you don’t want to allow threaded comments, you can uncheck it. Besides, you can also change the number of levels for threaded comments. - Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default. Comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page
It is unchecked by default. If you check it, you can break the comments in pages. You need to check it if your posts receive large number of comments that if displayed in single page, page becomes excessively long. You can control on how many comments you want to break comments into pages. Do you want older comments to appear on top or newer ones? You can control it from here.
Step 4:
Next setting is ‘Email me whenever’. This setting is for email notification about email. You have 2 options:
- Anyone posts a comment
It is checked by default. When checked, you get email notification when anyone posts a comment. If your mailbox is flooded with email notifications and don’t want email notifications, you can simply uncheck it. - A comment is held for moderation
When any comment is held for moderation, you’ve to decide whether to allow it or not as soon as possible. For this purpose, this setting send you email notification. If you don’t want such email notification, you can uncheck it.
Step 5:
‘Before a comment appears’ has 2 settings:
- Comment must be manually approved.
It is unchecked by default to allow automatic comment moderation. But, if you want to manually approve each comments, you have to check it. - Comment author must have a previously approved comment
This setting is for automatic approval of comments when comment author has a previously approved comment. It is checked by default.
Step 6:
This setting is for comment moderation. You can control comments from certain IP or with certain links and words in content and approve them manually. You have to add each IP, word/s, link in each line.
Step 7:
This setting is for comment blacklist (such comments are directly put into trash). You can add IP, links and words in the same way as in the previous setting.
Step 8:
Next settings set is ‘Avatars‘. It has 2 settings:
- Avatar Display
Show Avatars is checked by default. If you don’t want to show avatar in comments, you can uncheck it. - Maximum Rating
Avators displayed are from gravatar. In gravatar, there is an option to rate the avatar as G, PG, R and X. You can choose the maximum rating of avatar which which you want to allow.
Step 9:
What if comment author doesn’t have custom avatar of their own? In such case, you can choose a generic avatar from this setting.
Finally, click on the Save Changes button.
Wrapping Up
Hope the tutorial was helpful for you. If you have any question or have any issue related to Discussion settings of WordPress, please leave a comment below. I’ll help you in the best way possible.
We have many other WordPress tutorials on the way. So stay tuned.