Setting Discussion Options

The comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks features are controlled, in part, with settings in the Discussion Options administration panel (Figure 2). These settings let you enable or disable specific features, including pingbacks and comment moderation.

Figure 2. Set comment-related options in the Discussion Options administration panel.

Tip

• We tell you more about comment moderation and spam prevention later in this chapter.

To set discussion options

1.	If necessary, log into your blog and display the Dashboard.
2.	Click the Options button.
3.	Click the Discussion button in the second row of buttons to display Discussion Options (Figure 2).
4.	Set default options for new articles in the Usual settings for an article area as desired: Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article enables the pingback feature. As noted in the option, this may slow down posting of a post because each link must be pinged when the post is published. Allow link notifications from other Weblogs enables your posts to accept trackbacks and pingbacks. Turn this check box off if you do not want comments created from posts on other blogs. Allow people to post comments on the article enables your posts to accept comments from blog visitors.
5.	Set e-mail notification options in the E-mail me whenever area: Anyone posts a comment sends you an e-mail message whenever a comment is posted. A comment is held for moderation sends you an e-mail message whenever a comment is held for moderation.
6.	Set comment options in the Before a comment appears area: An administrator must approve the comment enables comment moderation and requires each comment to be approved by an administrator before it appears in the entry. Comment author must fill out name and e-mail requires a commenter to include his name and e-mail address to submit a comment. Comment author must have previously approved comment can automatically approve comments submitted by commenters who have already had comments approved. For automatic approval to occur, the first option in this section must be turned off.
7.	Set options in the Comment Moderation area as desired: Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than n links automatically holds a comment for moderation if it contains more than the number of links you specify. To hold a comment for moderation based on content, enter match words or phrases in the box at the bottom of the area. Be sure to enter each word or phrase on its own line.
8.	To automatically delete a comment based on its content, enter match words in the Comment Blacklist box at the bottom of the page. Be sure to enter each word on its own line.
9.	To prevent comments from being entered from IP addresses known for comment spam, turn on the Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies check box.
10.	Click Update Options to save your settings.

Tips

• The second two options in the Usual settings for an article area can be overridden when you author a post. Simply toggle check boxes in the Discussion area in the right column of the Write Post window (Figure 3). We tell you more about these options in Chapter 3.

  Figure 3. You can set comment and pingback features for a specific post or Page when writing it, as discussed in Chapter 3.

  

• If you turn on both e-mail optins in step 5 and enable comment moderation in steps 6 and 7, you'll get two e-mail messages for each approved comment.

• In step 7, you can click the Common spam words link to display information about spam words and a list of words that commonly appear in spam comments. This information can be found at codex.wordpress.org/Spam_Words.

• We tell you more about controlling comment spam later in this chapter.

• For additional control over who can comment, you can set options in the Membership area of the General Options administration panel. We tell you about those options in Chapter 2.

Warning!

• Use the Comment Blacklist box with care! WordPress will automatically delete any comment that contains a listed word, even if that word is only part of another word in the comment. You will not receive any notification of comments deleted with this feature. When in doubt about including a word, put the word in the Comment Moderation box discussed in step 7 instead.