In your Administration panel, you have full control over:
- Who can and can’t leave a comment.
- Whether comments are or aren’t allowed for the entire blog, or on a per post or page basis
- Whether comments are appear immediately or comments are moderated and need to be approved by an administrator before appearing on the blog.
There are two areas in the Settings menu of your Administration panel for controlling comments:
1. Discussion
2. Privacy - Edublogs supporter and Edublogs Campus blogs only
Changing comment settings is as simple as:
- Selecting the comment settings that you can use
- Once selected click Save Changes at the bottom of the screen
The Most Comment Settings Used
There is a wide range of comment settings that you can use.
Options used depend on factors such as comfort level, type of blog and school, District or organization’s blogging guidelines. For example, an educator might allow any one to comment on their personal blog, with no comment moderation, while their student blogs might require all comments to be moderated to prevent inappropriate comment from being published.
Most bloggers choose one of these four options (option 1 to 3 use Setting > Discussion while option 4 uses Settings > Privacy):
Option 1:
Comments can be posted by anyone and appear immediately
Option 2
Any visitors that have had a comment approved on the blog in the past will have their comment immediately posted and only comments from new visitors go into moderation
Option 3
All comments are moderated and need to be approved by an administrator before appearing on the blog
Option 4
Only people who have been added as users to the blog (Users > Add New) and logged into the blog can see the posts — hence these are the only people who can comment on the blog.
This option uses a privacy setting via Settings > Privacy. It is only available to Edublogs supporter and Edublogs Campus blogs.
Other important comment settings
There are quite a few comment setting options so lets explain the most important setting one at a time.
Default article settings
The default article settings controls how to handle post notifications.
The first two options deal with link notification:
- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: Enabled by default, your blog sends a notification to any site, or blog post, you’ve linked to in your posts
- Allow link notifications from other blogs – Enabled by default, it means your blog will accept ping, pingbacks and trackbacks from other blogs whenever a blogger links to your blog or blog post
In most circumstances you wouldn’t change these default settings because knowing when other people are talking about, or linking to, you from their posts is important. Most bloggers follow these link and pingbacks to read what others are saying about them.
The third option, Allow people to post comments on new articles, controls whether readers can or can’t leave comments on your blog. Normally bloggers keep this setting enabled.
Other comment settings
The two main other comment settings you need to understand are:
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail: Enabled by default, this option requires the commenter to fill out their name and e-mail in order to leave a comment. Most situations you really don’t want this disabled because it’s not a good idea to allow anonymous comments.
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment: When selected only logged in Edublogs users can leave a comment. Normally a blogger wouldn’t select this option because it restricts who can comment on their posts.
Email me whenever settings
The email me whenever option controls whether you receive emails any time anyone leaves a comment on your blog and any time a comment is held for moderation.
The email for:
- Anyone posts a comment: is sent to email address of the person who wrote the post (i.e. the post author)
- A comment is held for moderation: is sent to blog’s admin email address (Setting > General)
Normally you would keep both these settings enabled so you’re notified of all comments.
Comment Moderation
The comment moderation options are used to control spam comments.
Normally spam comments include a large number of hyperlinks. The default setting is 2; you can adjust this to your needs. For example, educators who require their students to include hyperlinks in comments may choose to make this higher.
Another option for controlling spam comments is to add specific words, name , URL, email address or IP into the comment moderation box. You use this comment moderation option where you have repeat spam comment offenders.
