Comments: How To Set Up and Manage

You can configure your website to allow visitors to comment on either your blog posts, web pages or both.

Most settings for Comments are on Dashboard, Settings, Discussion. There is one important setting on Dashboard, Settings, General (Membership: Anyone Can Register).

Posts

Here are some common Post Comment configuration choices you should know about:

  • Turn Off Post Comments Altogether: Turn on the check box “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”. Turn off the check box under Settings, General for “Anyone can register”.
  • Allow Comments by Registered Members: Turn on “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”. On Settings, General, turn on the check box for Anyone Can Register.
  • Default Comments Setting Off for New Posts: Turn off the check box to “Allow people to post comments on the article”. This will mean that new posts will have comments turned off unless you switch them on under Discussion Options for that post.
  • Allow Post Comments after Moderation: Turn on “An administrator must always approve the comment”.
  • Allow Post Comments For Prior Commenters: Turn off the “An administrator must always approve the comment”. Turn on the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”.

You can setup notifications by email to yourself whenever a new comment is made.

Pages

Note: Page level comments are turned off for your website by default. To activate them, you must first use Appearance, Site Design and tick the box to activate Page Comments (this field is down towards the very end of the Site Design screen). Once you activate Page Comments for your site, you might want to use Edit Pages to do a bulk update to turn comments off for all individual pages, then manually turn on the pages you want to have comments.

You can also allow or disallow Page Comments for your standard web pages.

  • go to Dashboard, Manage, Pages and Edit the page
  • set the Discussion Options to Allow Comments if you want visitors to be able to leave comments on the Page
  • set the Discussion Options to Allow Pings if you would like excerpts of articles from other blogs linking to you to appear as comments at the bottom of your Page