Since it originated as a blogging platform WordPress has good support for comments and discussion on your posts. In this article we’ll discuss how you can manage comments in WordPress, including choosing where to allow them and moderation.
How to Enable Comments:
To enable comments on your WordPress posts go to Settings > Discussion and check the ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’ box.
This will display a comments box at the bottom of any new posts that you create.
You will notice that it mentions that these settings can be overridden for individual articles. This can be useful if you want to disallow comments on specific posts and can be done within the post editor by scrolling down to ‘Discussion’ and unchecking the ‘allow comments’ box.
Enabling comments on old posts
It’s important to note that enabling comments in the discussion settings page only affects new posts, not existing ones. You can enable comments individually on each post as mentioned above, but if you have a lot of posts this will take a long time, so a quicker way to do it is to go to ‘Posts’ and select the posts that you want to enable comments on and then select ‘Edit’ from the bulk actions dropdown. You can then select ‘Allow’ from the ‘Comments’ dropdown as shown below:
Moderation
An important part of managing comments in WordPress is moderation. Unfortunately with comments forms enabled you will inevitably get spam comments. There are a number of options within WordPress to control comments, for example you can set it so that only logged in users can post comments – a useful function for member based sites.
The most simple way to manage comments is to simply check the ‘Comment must be manually approved’ box in Settings > Discussion as shown below. An alternative is to have it set so that not all comments have to be moderated before they appear but you can set up a blacklist of words that will force a comment to be held for moderation before it appears on your site. Similarly you can set posts to be trashed if they contain specific words.
Summary
There are a large number of options within WordPress to make managing comments and discussion simple and suitable for your specific website. We’d encourage you to explore the different settings to identify the best setup for your individual website.