How to Moderate Comments in WordPress

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Moderating comments is one of the most essential parts, which keeps your WordPress clean and elegant.

By going into Comments from you dashboard menu, you can view all your comments. Here you’ll find 4 tabs that include Pending, Approved, Spam, and Trash. The pending option will contain all the comments that need approval. The approved section will contain the ones you approved, the spam section will contain the spams, and the trash section will contain the ones you deleted.

Now to mark a comment spam, head over to it, and you’ll see the option popping out. You can also approve, reply, edit and delete the comment in same way. You can easily identify a spam comment by observing it a bit. Look for contents of the comment. They usually contain strange fonts and characters, links and such. Most of the time, they also contain a fake name like The Best Insurance For You or The Cheapest Monitors. If you want to filter out generic comments like Awesome Post, you can do that too.

WordPress usually comes with Akismet pre-installed. You’ll need to activate the plugin and signup for this anti-spam service in order to use it. Akismet will recognize the spam comments’ characteristics, once you start marking the comments by yourself. It’ll then mark them automatically, and you’ll be visiting the page a lot less.

However, Akismet can make mistakes too. You, in that case, can still go to your spam tab, head over to the comment and click on Not Spam to mark it as not a spam. That comment will then move to the pending tab. Spam comments are usually deleted after 15 days by default. However, you can delete them all at once by clicking the Empty Spam option. That can also slow down the site a bit. In this way, you can also take care of your deleted comments by heading over to the Trash tab and noting the Restore option. Remember that trash is emptied after 30 days by default, if you don’t remove it manually. You can also view all your pending and approved comments under your posts. If you don’t see the comments below your posts, head over to the top and select Screen Options. An expanded menu will appear. Tick Comments to view comments. You can also reply, delete, and edit your comments from here.

Now head over to the Screening Option again and tick Discussion. Here you can decide whether to allow comments, or allow trackbacks and pingbacks in the post.

Now head over to the Settings option in your dashboard menu and select Discussion Settings. Here you can customize and moderate comments for the whole site. In the Other comment settings, you can decide whether the comment author must fill out name and email, if they have to register to post comments, when the comments will be deleted automatically, to what level you can enable threaded comments etc.

You can also choose to receive emails post to any comment by noting the Email me whenever section. In the Before a comment appears section, you can decide whether the comments must be manually approved or if a previously approved comment author should be provided with automated approval.

You can select the avatars for your comment authors the Default Avatar section.

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