There are two main ways to manage comments in your administration panel:
- Edit Comment Screen
- The Recent comments module on your Dashboard
Brief Overview of Your Edit Comment Screen
The Edit Comment Screen is a more advance comment editor compared to using the Recent comments module and is the main screen where you’ll manage comments. Here’s where you see a listing of all comments, 20 posts per page, that have been written on your blog.
There are two options you will use to access your Comments screen:
- Clicking on Comments in the navigation menu.
- Selecting Comments in the Shortcuts menu in the upper right of your administration panel
In the Comments screen you can search for comments:
- By comment type (i.e. comment or ping) – a ping is also called a pingback
- Keyword such as author name, blog URL.
You can also choose to view all comments, only those that have been approved, those pending (i.e. those comments which are in the moderation queue and need to be approved by an administrator before appearing on the blog), or those marked as spam.
The comment action links
Hovering your mouse over a comment brings up six action links beneath the comment text.
Approve/Unapprove
Clicking the action link Approve publishes the comment to your blog and changes the link to Unapprove. Whereas clicking the Unapprove link removes the comment from your blog and puts the comment back in the moderation queue.
Spam
Clicking the action link Spam removes the comment from your blog and places it in your spam folder. You can delete all spam using the Delete all spam when you are looking at your spam comments.
Delete
Clicking the action link Deletes removes the comment from your blog and deletes it. Be careful though; once deleted you can’t undelete a comment.
Edit
Clicking the action link Edit opens the comment into full edit mode where you can edit content in any box. For example, remove a student’s surname, fix a blog URL or hyperlink, provide students help with spelling or grammatical areas.
Once finished editing click Update Comment.
Quick Edit
Clicking the action link Quick Edit accomplishes the same as the Edit link except instead of taking you to a new Edit Comment page, it drops down a quick edit text box. Benefit is you can do a fast edit on the same page.
TIP: If you double click on a comment it opens the comment into Quick Edit mode.
Reply
Clicking the action link Reply drops down a quick text box on the same page to allow you to reply to a comment right from the Edit Comment screen. This means you can reply here rather than directly on your blog.
Recent Comments Module
The Recent Comments Module is located on your dashboard and displays the 5 most recent comments for your blog.
Hovering your mouse over the comments brings up five action links which makes it easy to Approve/Unapprove, Edit, Reply, Mark as Spam, or Delete Comments directly from your dashboard.
For example, clicking the Reply action link brings up a form that lets you reply to comments from your dashboard.
