A simple guide to moderate comments on WordPress blog
Are you running your blog on WordPress or you may have your business site built using WordPress which has a separate blog section.
Then comments are the integral part of any blog post. Comments give interactivity to a blog post.
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You may ask that there are some blogs which doesn’t allow comments or they doesn’t have comment section. Are they wrong ?
Never, here nothing is about right or wrong. If you don’t want to add comment section in your blog then it’s your decision & it’s perfectly alright.
But comments open the door of two-way communication between you and your reader.
You have written something, someone read it and have something to say regarding your post so he/ she can directly write his/ her feelings in the comment section.Based on that you can also give your response. In this way it becomes very interactive and engaging. That’s where the real juice of a blog post is.
Hope you have understood. Now coming to the real point. How you can moderate comments on WordPress blog.
Because when you are running a popular blog or soon to be a popular blog then lots of people will comment and you know all the comments are not really meaningful there comes many spam comments also.
So to keep your site clean from all those junks comments it’s your responsibility to moderate comments and keep the good ones.
Using WordPress moderating comments is very easy it will not take too much time, if you once know how to do it.
Here I have considered that you are using default comment system of WordPress & running a self hosted WordPress site.
So here are the ways to accomplish it (moderating comments). have a look.
To check out how many comments have been submitted, just go to WP-admin dashboard in back-end. There you will find a tab called “Comments” in the left admin sidebar. See the picture below.
Beside Comments there you will find, how many new / un moderated comments are there. Click on Comments. It will take you to the Comments section of WordPress from where you can perform operations like Approve, un approve, Reply, Edit & many more.
Inside comments section you will find 5 different segment for comments based on the comment’s present status.
These segments are All, Pending, Approved, Spam & Trash. See the picture above to know where the segments are. You can also simultaneously check in your WordPress setup, matching with the image shown here.
Initially all comments will come under All section irrespective of it’s status. In Pending section all pending comments will show.
Once you will approve a comment, it will move to the Approved segment. If you mark any comment as spam it will move to the Spam segment.
Now you must be thinking how will you do all operations mentioned above, right ? No problem, look at the picture below.
Actually when you take your mouse pointer over a comment the following options (Approve, Reply, Quick Edit, Edit, Spam & Trash) will come up.
To approve a comment click on the Approve link and after approval immediately the respective comment will move from the pending section to Approved section as I mentioned before.
If you click on Reply then a new section called Reply to Comment will come, See the picture below. From this section you can give reply to the respective comment from WP-admin dashboard.
Now coming to the next two options Edit & Quick Edit. just click on quick edit then the following section will open as shown in the picture below. From this section comments can be edited.
Now what the Edit option is for ? Is there any difference between Edit & Quick Edit. So here is this, see the image below. It shows if you click the Edit option then you will get the following screen.
From this section you will not only be able to change the basic comment fields but from this section you can also change the status of the comment.
Now the last two options Spam & Trash. Clicking on spam option for comment, the comment goes to the spam section and if you click Trash then selected comment goes to the Trash segment. From trash if you want you can permanently delete a comment.
If you see the above pictures carefully then you will find that there are two drop-down options as shown in the image here.
The first one is for taking bulk actions means performing following operations Approve, Unapprove, Mark as Spam or Move to Trash on multiple comments by checking the left check box in each each comment.
The second one lets you choose what you want to see in the comment section “All comment types”, “Comments” or “Pings”.
This is the simple way to moderate comments on WordPress blogs. I have tried to explain all important points needed. If you have anything to ask or if I have missed something then please let me know through comment.