Tutorial Overview

Topics covered in this WordPress tutorial (click link to jump to topic):

The Skinny on Comments

Comments can be an important aspect of your blog website. By allowing your readers to participate in conversations with you or other readers, it creates a community that gives them reason to come back and visit your site.

Why Should I Enable Comments?

Essentially you are creating community around your topic area. The goal is to engage people. When you post an article, and others read it, they like to share their views and outlooks with you, as well as other readers. When they leave a post, it gives them incentive to check back to see what others wrote. Someone could want to ask you a question about your post, or thank you, for helping him or her out with a problem.

Your Commitment in Time versus the Benefit

Some people always allow comments on their posts and pages, and have them automatically appear on their blog site. Then they go through a couple times a day checking for spam comments and deleting posts that do not add to the discussion. This is laborious, and you need to consider carefully whether you have the time or inclination.

Once your blog goes live, and comments are left open, it wont be long before you notice that the vast majority of people posting comments are simply spamming your site in an effort to create link popularity for their web site by getting their web address on as many other people’s sites as possible.

Obviously this contradicts your objective of trying to create a community around your subject matter. So you have to decide: should I allow comments, and lose time in moderating those comments? Or should I ignore the commentary aspect of my blog and focus on my content. Only you can decide.

Enabling Comments

Visit your Dashboard and on the left hand menu, under Settings click Discussion. From here you can choose to enable comments, as well as waiting times. Also, you can enable comments page by page and post by post by ticking or unticking the allow comments on this post option underneath the main editing box for each page or post.

How to View Your Comments

Go to your Dashboard, and click Comments. If you have the Recent Comments module running on the Dashboard, you can also access your most recent posts from there.

Hover over each comment and you will be able to approve a comment, mark it as spam, or delete it. You can decide to unapprove a previously approved comment in case you wanted to edit the comment or contact the author prior to posting. You can edit the post by clicking on edit.

Other Resources

http://codex.wordpress.org/Comments_Comments_SubPanel