In your website’s Discussion Settings, you can control how people interact with your site through comments. This guide will explain each setting.
In this guide
To visit the Discussion Settings:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings → Discussion.
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In the Default article settings, you can set the following options for new posts or pages. These settings can be changed individually for each post.
- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: This determines if your blog will send out pingbacks to other blogs when you publish articles that link to those blogs.
- Allow link notifications from other blogs: This determines if your blog will accept pingbacks from other blogs that link to your blog.
- Allow people to post comments on new articles: This option allows you to enable or disable comments on all new posts by default.
The Comments settings have quite a few options, so let’s explain them one at a time:
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail: When this setting is on, anyone leaving a comment will be forced to leave a name and a valid email address. If the setting is off, visitors can leave anonymous comments. While your commenters do not have to fill in the email field if you’ve turned this setting off, it will still be visible to them when they comment.
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment: If this option is enabled, only logged-in WordPress.com users will be allowed to leave comments. If it is not checked, any visitor can leave a comment.
- Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days: This setting can be used to shut down comments on articles that are a certain number of days old. After the number of days have passed, the post will not accept new comments.
- Enable threaded (nested) comments up to __ levels deep: Turn on this option to allow visitors to reply to other comments inline/nested — a reply to a comment appears underneath it, slightly indented to the right. When turned on, it can allow for better discussions and responses. We suggest using a maximum of 3 levels deep. Anything higher and the theme layouts may not work as expected. Note: Enabling the setting only applies to new comments since existing comments don’t have any threading date. However, disabling this setting applies to all comments.
- Break comments into pages with __ comments per page and the first/last page displayed by default: If your posts/pages get a lot of comments, you may want to split the comments into pages. You can choose how many top-level comments (nested comments are not counted and will not be split between pages) to show for each page. You can also choose to show the first or last page by default when a visitor first views the comments.
- Comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page: This setting allows you to reverse the order of comments. You can display comments in ascending or descending order.
- Use Markdown for comments: Enable this option so your visitors can format the text of their comments using markdown.
The E-mail me whenever options control when you get notified about new comments. You can choose to receive email notifications whenever:
- Anyone posts a comment.
- A comment is held for moderation.
- Someone likes one of your posts.
- Someone reblogs one of your posts.
- Someone follows your blog.
You can choose what happens to a comment before it appears publicly on your site. You can enable or disable the following options:
- Comment must be manually approved: If this setting is on, all comments will go into moderation and they will need to be approved by an administrator before appearing on the blog.
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment: If this option is on, any visitors who have had a comment approved on the blog in the past will automatically have all future comments approved. Only comments from new visitors will go into moderation.
Thanks to comment moderation, you can approve or reject comments before they appear on your site. Use the following tools:
- Hold a comment in the queue if it contains __ or more links: A lot of spam comments include a large number of URLs, which could be unwanted. The default setting here is 2, and you can make this higher or lower. If you set this to 0, all comments will be held in moderation, which would be the same as checking Comment must be manually approved in the previous section.
- When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP address, it will be held in the moderation queue for you to approve or reject. Write one word or IP per line in the box, and click Save settings at the top of the comments section to save your changes. Comment moderation will match what is inside words too, so if you moderate for the word “press”, it would hold comments containing the text “WordPress.”
Disallowed comments is very similar to Comment Moderation described above, but when something matches here, the comment is deleted and sent to Trash instead of held for moderation.
These instructions are referring to the WP-Admin interface. To view this interface, click the View tab in the upper right corner and select Classic view.
In the WP-Admin view, there are some additional settings:
- Avatar Display: Show or hide avatars of those who comment.
- Gravatar Hovercards: With this enabled, your readers can view commenters’ profiles by hovering their mouse over their profile picture.
- Maximum Rating: When a comment author’s avatar is displayed, you can limit the maturity level of an avatar to one of the following ratings: G, PG, R, X.
- Default Avatar: Choose a generic logo or a computer-generated avatar for users who don’t have their own custom profile picture. If a user comments on your blog but doesn’t have a WordPress.com avatar or an email address associated with Gravatar, this is the avatar that will be shown.
- Comments: Change the text above your site’s comment box from the default “Leave a reply” to whatever text you wish to display. You can also choose between a light, dark, or transparent color scheme for the comments.
- Jetpack Subscriptions Settings: Change whether your visitors can subscribe to your posts or comments or both with a “follow blog” option in the comments form and a popup subscribe modal.
After changing any of these settings, click the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the screen.
