What is a Comment in WordPress? (Beginner’s Guide)

Blog comments are a powerful feature that many blogs don’t make enough use of. They give readers a chance to interact with the blog post’s content, ask questions, give feedback, and even argue with the author and other readers. 

Blog comments can improve the overall reading experience and add value to the blog by making people feel like they are part of a community and getting them to talk about things. But managing and moderating comments can also take a lot of time and be hard, especially when you have to deal with spam or comments that aren’t appropriate. In this blog post, we’ll talk about blog comments and give you advice on how to use and manage them on your own blog.

So, read on to find out what is a Comment in WordPress and how you can make use of it in the world of blogging.

You find comments usually beneath the blog post content, along with the commenter’s name.

A vibrant comment section can help you and your readers create a sense of community around your blog. Visitors can leave feedback, ask questions, share their own point of view on the topic, and more.
If you choose to allow them, comments can be added to WordPress posts, pages, and other post kinds. It is, however, your responsibility to stimulate conversation among site visitors and inspire them to post comments.

Let’s start with comment moderation and approval.

The Comments Screen in WordPress

All comments on a WordPress website are shown on the Comments page in the WordPress admin area. 

There are several vies for the different types of comment status like pending, Approved, Spam or comments being in Trash:

• Pending: Visitors have left pending comments on your blog posts, but they won’t show up until you approve them.
• Approved: Approved comments have been published and can be seen by everyone who visits your website on your blog posts.
• Spam: Spam comments have been marked as possibly unwanted or irrelevant, so your site visitors can’t see them.
• Trash: Trash comments have been marked as unwanted, and after 30 days, they will be deleted automatically.

When you move your mouse over a comment, its action links will show up. You can approve a comment to make it visible to everyone who visits your site, or you can unapprove it to put it back in the “pending” state.

Of course it is also possible to answer people’s comments. If you respond to a specific comment, your response will show up right under that comment, de facto creating a comment thread. 

You can also choose to change the comments that people leave on your site.

When you click “Quick Edit,” a text box pops up so you can change the comment without having to reload the page. On the other hand, clicking “Edit” gives you more options for changing the name, user email, and other things.

Sometimes comments are marked as spam although they are not. To correct this you can mark it as Not Spam.

You can bring back any comment which you have being deleted previously from the trash by clicking on “Restore”. They stay in the trash for 30 days. As soon as these 30 days have passed WordPress deletes them permanently.

Where do I change WordPress Discussion Settings?

To modify the more general Settings, you have to move over to the Settings » Discussion page within your WordPress Admin Dashboard. The first part of these options is for article settings that are set by default.

If you check “Try to notify any blogs that the article links to,” your post will send trackbacks or pingbacks to the articles you linked to. With this feature, you can let other blog owners know that you’ve linked to one of their posts.

If the page you linked to uses a pingback-enabled system like WordPress, the owner of that website will get a message with a link to your article. The owner of that website can then choose to show your trackback in the comments section of their website.

Enabling WordPress accepting pingbacks from other websites is by checking “Allow link notifications from other blogs”. Pingbacks allow you to notify other website owners that you have linked to their website. 

Pingbacks from other sites will appear below the Comments screen. They appear whenever a new post contains a link to one of your previously published articles.

WordPress’ websites don’t need to have comments turned on. Simply uncheck the box next to “Allow people to post comments on new articles” to turn them off.

If you turn off comments on your website, the comments that have already been posted will not be removed. It won’t accept any more comments. You can turn them on again whenever you want.

What Is Comment Moderation?

WordPress’s Comment Moderation functionality gives site administrators the option to review and moderate user comments before publishing them or removing them entirely. Moderating comments can be adjusted in the Settings » Discussion menu.

Choose the checkbox next to “Comment must be manually approved” from your site’s configuration page (Settings » Conversation) to activate moderating.

Website administrators can prevent spam, harassment, and other inappropriate comments from appearing on their site by using a comment moderation system. Employing comment moderation in conjunction with an anti-spam plugin like Akismet can drastically reduce the volume of spam on your site.

Only let registered users comment

You can select to only let registered users comment on your website if you want to. The first step is to make it possible for people to sign up for your WordPress site. Choose “Anyone can sign up” from the “General” section of the settings menu to let anyone sign up.

Make sure that Subscriber is the default role for New Users before saving your changes, if you do not want them to have the ability to post.

After letting people sign up for your website, go back to the Settings » Discussion screen. Enable the “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” option within the “Other comment settings” section.

Get Updates About WordPress Comments By Email

You can also set up email alerts for new comments and comments awaiting moderation on the Settings » Discussion page. Choose these options and any time a website gives you a trackback or pingback, you’ll get an email about it.

But you won’t get any email notifications for comments or trackbacks that have been marked as spam.

If you don’t get email notifications after checking these boxes, make sure your email address is correct in Settings » General. Check your spam folder if you do not receive them.

Enable or Disable Comments on a Single Post in WordPress

You can change the standard settings for comments on articles by turning comments on or off for a single post, page, or custom post type.

To turn off comments and trackbacks, uncheck the boxes when editing the post. To turn them on, check the boxes.

What Is an Avatar? And a Gravatar?

In online groups, a user’s profile picture is called an “avatar.” Gravatar o the other side is a service that lets users use the same avatar image on thousands of websites, the service is owned by Automattic. Automattic is a company started by Matt Mullenweg, who can be named the founder of WordPress.

Every time a user leaves a comment, WordPress looks out to see if they have a gravatar. If the user has a Gravatar account with an image, WordPress uses this image as their profile picture. If they don’t WordPress shows a default Avatar image.

“Mystery Person” is the name of the Avatar picture that comes per default with WordPress. 

If you uncheck the “Show Avatars” box, you can choose not to use Avatar images on your website. But since most WordPress themes come with templates for showing Gravatars, it might not look good on the front end of your website.

We hope that you found this post to be informative and that you learnt something new about WordPress comments.