Tutorial to Moderate Comments on WordPress

Posted in Tutorials Videos

In this tutorial, we will show you how to moderate comments on your WordPress site.

Detailed Tutorial:

1. In order for your visitors to be able to place comments on your posts, you need to checkmark “Allow Comments” in the discussion panel of your post.[1]

Now visitors may type in a comment at the bottom of your post …

2. It is suggested that you have comment moderation and email notifications turned on in WordPress admin -> Settings -> Discussion.[2]

This is done by check marking “an administrator must always approve the comment”, and check marking “email me whenever anyone posts a comment”, and finally check marking “email me whenever a comment is held for moderation”.

3. Now whenever a visitor posts a comment, they will be informed that their comment is awaiting moderation.

Their comment is not published, until you as site owner approves it.  This is known as “comment moderation”.  Because there are many comments that are simply spam.

4. Furthermore, you will receive an email letting you know that there is a comment waiting for you to approve or disapprove.  This “comment moderation” email looks like this …

5. Click the link in the email that will take you to the moderation panel in your WordPress admin.

(You could have also arrived to this comment moderation panel by clicking on Comments and then Pending in the WordPress admin.)

Here you will see the visitor’s comment along with their name, email, and website link that they had posted.  Understand that this could be a fake name or information. This website link could be a link to their website, their Facebook page, or the twitter page.  You should take a look at the link to see whether the site that they are linking to meets your approval or not.

If it does, then click on the “Approve” link (as shown above) to have the comment published. You may need to hover your mouse over the area before you see the Approve link.

6.  If the comment or website link does not meet your approval, click “Trash” and the comment will not be published.  Clicking on “Spam” also will not publish the comment.  If the comment is partially good but the website link is not acceptable, click “Edit” and you will be able to edit the visitor’s comment or remove their website link.  Clicking on “Reply” means to publish the comment along with your own reply comment after it.

7.  After approving a comment, the comment will also show up in the Approved section of the Comments panel …

WordPress gives you full control over your comments.  So if you change your mind, you can still unpublished the previously approved comments by clicking on the “Unapprove” link.

Notes:

[1] If you don’t see the discussion panel, click on “Screen Options” and checkmark “Discussion”.

[2] In order to allow comments on older posts, you also have to uncheck “automatically close comments on posts older than” under WordPress admin -> Settings -> Discussion.

 

---