How to Manage WordPress Comments [Video]

What will we be learning?

[box]Video Title: How to Manage WordPress Comments
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjUJ0a5pHlM
Accompanying Course: Beginner’s Guide to WordPress – Web Design Course[/box]

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Transcript: 

So in this video all we are going to be doing is talking about how do you manage your comments, right. Ultimately you are going to be having. Well hopefully you will be having a lot of comments. This is just for our demo site. So we don’t really have many comments on here simply because we just have 2 random posts made.

And so what I want to show you is kind of two fold, is how do you actually reply or manage these comments. But also how do you, have do you effectively remove spam comments.

But the first thing that I want to show you is actually, well first, where do you find the comments. So in your dashboard, you will see the comments right here. And depending on your settings, either will wait for the comment to be approved before it actually is live.

Or you know, it will show you have 3 pending comments or automatically could be approved or go straight into spam depending on the settings and depending on the plugins that you use. Right, so as you can see, these three that are marked, they are marked as spam comments.

And so, I will show you kind of how to remove those later. How you can, you know, effectively do what you need to do with them. In another video, I actually do show you, how do you use the plugin called Akismet , free plugin to kind of limit the number of spams that you get.

But the first thing we are going to do is, just go into settings and then we are going to go into discussion. And so, in here what we are going to be seeing is there is a lot of different other, it’s surprising you think that the comments are simply just comments, there is not much to them.

But surprising, there is actually a lot of options in regards to the comments of what we can potentially change. And so, these are the default article settings. So there is a number of things that we can go through, probably. Let’s see what we can get through, how much time it will take.

So, attempt to notify any blogs linked from the article, not too necessary. Allow link notifications from other blogs, sure yeah you can have these trackbacks, these pingbacks. They are beneficial but they also can be a hindrance as well if you have too many at times.

For example, they become spam, right. So you can kind of, you always can change these in the future if you find that you don’t need them or you do need them later on. Allow people to post comments on new articles. Sure yeah, why wouldn’t you?

Comment author must fill out name and email. And if you recall, there is another video that I made about a different plugin that we are using called the mailchimp. I believe its mailchimp email newsletter lite, something along those lines is that, it allows users to be able to subscribe to your newsletter directly right after they post their comment.

So that’s why do leave this checked simply because it allows them to, if they are already. It it requires their name and their email, you know they are more likely to leave that last button checked out. They already entered their email, might as well leave it.

So yeah, leave the comment author must fill name and email. And plus when you are replying to an email, how they are ever going to know? How they are ever going to know about it if there is no email to correspond to it. Users must be registered and logged in to comment. And so no, I don’t keep this checked simply because you know, especially the website that I run is.

It should allow, this is a blog. It should allow anybody to have the ability to comment. That being said if its ma member only site, you probably would only want registered users to be able to comment. Or if you run something that’s a membership site, that is specifically that you have to pay in order to gain access.

Well you wouldn’t want anybody to be able to comment or if that the add on. If you paid a specific amount of money to join a site and they were allowed to comment. And you know, whatever your business module is, it’s entirely up to you.

But that’s kind of when that could be beneficial or not. Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 days. And so, in my opinion this is only going to be good if you do get a lot of comments and you get comments on very old articles.

For example, a website that I ran, you know these. I was getting questions on very very old articles. It was a lesson time ultimately and I was getting old, a lot of comments on things I honestly, I completely forgot about. And so that’s why I checked this off and I said, after 45 days and something like that, I said that ok, well that was enough time that they had enough comments there.

I was just repeating the same answers over and over again. And it wasn’t necessarily beneficial for anybody. At that point there were too specific of issues. For this, that website it wasn’t beneficial. So that’s why I closed the comments. But for the website that I run for wpforall, you know it’s not necessary. You know I would like as many comments as I can get for however long it would be, you know.

I will be more than happy to answer any questions even for an article that was two years old. But I don’t actually have the website for two years so that wouldn’t be an issue. Enable threaded comments. So it allows you to have, you know, people reply to other people 5 levels deep.

You can have it whatever you want. Break comments into pages, sure if you want to or not. Email me whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is held for moderation. Yeah, I think those are good options just because you get email in your email inbox to say, you know, you want to reply to them as immediate as possible and so that will allow you to do that.

Before a comment appears, the comment must be manually approved or not? And yeah, I mean if you get a lot of spam and you are not using a plugin for the spam. Yeah you probably want to leave this checked. You want to manually approve it. But if you do use a plugin and you are not getting a whole lot of spam.

Then yeah, I mean I would think that just leave it, leave it so that you don’t have to worry about it. Comment author must have previously approved comment. So no, I don’t necessarily do that. You can have people in the blacklist. And so I actually never explained what a blacklist is.

So you can imagine what the blacklist is that. You know you can blacklist an IP address. If there is an individual who, I don’t know, I never had to do this, but for example maybe they are harassing somebody or they are you know, just being kind of rude and you don’t think that it’s going to benefit your overall community of your website, you can put their IP address here or their email or their name. Whatever it is and you can just blacklist it.

Or if it contains any of the words. If it contains any words specifically like for example, sewer words. Something that you don’t, it depends on what your website is, maybe don’t want these things in there. Then they will blacklist the comment and it will just not allow it to be shown.

And then so you can have the avatar. Show an avatar, not show an avatar. And then what is your default avatar. And so this mystery man is one of them. It can be blank, it could be many of these. Well we can actually, and I will show in the future video, how do you add a default logo that you would want your users to use.

And for me, I actually personally just like the mystery man just because I have never really thought of a good way to, you know if I put a logo on it. For example if I put my own logo for the default avatar, well then users may be confused, well is that me or is that another commenter?

Is it the person running the website or the separate commenter? So that’s why I just stick with the mystery man. It’s kind of, you know what, its convention. And yeah I mean, I will show you in a future video or if you have already watched already how to actually add a gravatar to your personal profile.

I think that would be most beneficial. And you can just save these changes. So yeah, it took a quite a bit of time to actually go through the settings. But the other parts of the comments are actually fairly simple. So we are going to go into comments right here.

And so yeah. So, I mentioned before you can use the Akismet plugin and I will show you in a future video actually how to install that. But, or how to configure it I guess. But let’s say these comments are marked as spam already. What do we do with them?

You can just do it right here. Approve it. And so for example we can approve it, we can reply to it, we can edit it or we can move it to the spam. The spam actually is not, technically deleted yet. It just marked it as a spam. Or we can just trash it.

Let’s just say we want to trash it. And once it’s in the trash, I believe just like posts, you have to delete it permanently, right. Because when it’s in the trash, it can still be restored. It can still be, or has the option to be deleted.

And I think after 15 days, the, things in the trash are already deleted. But don’t quote me on that one because that may be specific if you use Akismet plugin. So you can just delete it permanently. And just click apply.

The next thing that I want to show you is actually, I guess, how do you reply to a comment? How do you reply to a comment? And there is a number of ways that you can actually reply to a comment. You can either reply to them directly on the website. So for example if it’s in the post, you can directly comment on that, the, on that post directly.
Or you can just reply it right here. So you reply it right here. It’s kind of, it’s simple. But the only problem is, do you remember what this post was about? For example, this one was, since it’s a travel blog or travel test blog. It was about airplane deals. And you probably won’t actually remember, or maybe you do. So then you can comment directly.

If the comment was very clear, what they are saying, you can comment directly as that was easy. You can just say thanks. And then reply to them. And then it will just post the reply. Likewise you can mass, you can do something in mass or bulk actions. You can unapproved all of them, mark as spam or you can select them individually and things like that, you know.

It’s fairly easy to use, this comment system. It’s similar to I would say, how you would do a post.