All About WordPress Comments
WordPress comments can be wonderful or they can be a near nightmare! Having real visitors comment on your posts can be a great way for people to engage with your content and let you know their thoughts and feelings. The comments in WordPress can also be terrible and a post can quickly be filled by hundreds if not thousands of spam comments advertising all sorts of junk and things that are of no interest. These comments are generally added by bots and a good spam filter can pick that it is a bot and reject the comment.
In this WPDesigns article, we will discuss WordPress comments and how to control them.
Visitors to your website will interact with you, let you know their thoughts and feelings about your article (for the better or worse!) and each other through comments. A default WordPress post inserts a comments text box after your content where users can add their comments when you allow comments on a Page or article. When you or an anti-spam plugin accept a comment, it will appear below the relevant content. WordPress offers a comprehensive range of options for building a community from your site’s users, whether you want to customize how you accept feedback or tweak how your site displays them.
Comments normally appear right after the content of the blog post, along with the commenter’s name, the date, and the time they left the comment.
A lively comment section will help you and your readers create a sense of community around your blog. Visitors may provide input, ask questions, and express their own opinions on the topic, among other things so it is often worth the time spent sorting out the spam issues to get build that sense of community.
WordPress Comments Screen
The Comments tab on the WordPress Dashboard menu displays all the comments on your website. By default, it shows all comments but you can filter the results into Pending, Approved, Spam, and Trash comments by switching to the relevant filter.
The filters are as follow:
- All: In this section, all the comments will appear here.
- Mine: Here you can see all of your comments.
- Pending: This is the section where all the new comments will be stored until they are deleted or approved.
- Approved: When you approve comments from the pending section then they will appear here. All visitors to your website can see those comment on your blog posts, which are written and publicly accessible.
- Spam: Posts that have been flagged as potentially unwanted or irrelevant are hidden from the site’s users will appear here.
- Trash: Here will appear deleted comments and will automatically removed after 30 days.
How to Approve Comments
When you move your mouse over a comment, the action links for that comment will appear. You can approve a comment and make it available to all visitors to your blog, or you can unapprove it to return it to the pending state.
How to Reply to Any Comment
You can easily reply directly to any comment if you want. To do so, go to comments from the admin area and then hover on any comment and you will see the reply action. When you reply to a specific comment, your response will appear directly underneath the comment which is called a nested comment.
Quick Edit
Quick edit and the edit option are almost the same but when you click on edit it will take you to a new page. From here you can also change the comment status from approved, pending, and spam.
How to Mark any Comment as Spam
When you will hover over on any comment you can see the spam option appear. You can click this to easily mark any comment as spam. Once checked it will then be moved into the spam tab.
How to Delete Any Comment
When you hover over any comment you can see the bin link here. Just click on it and the comment will be deleted. The deleted comment will be stored in the bin for 30 days before being automatically deleted.
How to Restore Any Comment
After deleting any comment you can also easily restore it. To do so, go to your comment dashboard and then click on the bin tab as all deleted comments will be stored there. Choose whichever comment you would like to restore, hover it and then you can click “Restore” and it will go back to its previous state.
Stopping Spam Comments
Spam comments can be a big problem with WordPress websites as bots will come to unsuspecting sites and continuously add new messages to various spam websites. This can quickly become problematic as your website will quickly become swamped and overwhelmed.
To help solve this issue we would suggest Anti-Spam Bee. This is an incredibly effective free plugin. If you need help to install the plugin you can check out our guide on how to install WordPress Plugins.
