Understanding the Discussion Settings on Your WordPress Blog
WordPress provides several options under Discussion Settings to manage comments and interactions on your blog:
- Default Article Settings – Configure default rules for links and comments on your posts. These settings can still be customized individually for each article.
- Additional Comment Options – Manage features like automatically closing comments on posts older than a set number of days, setting levels for nested comments, and splitting long comment threads into multiple pages.
- Email Notifications – Receive email alerts when comments are posted or held for moderation.
- Comment Approval – Decide whether comments must be manually approved or if only authors with previously approved comments can post without review.
- Comment Moderation – Automatically hold comments that exceed a specified number of links (to prevent spam). You can also filter comments based on certain words in the content, URL, email, or IP address—even if the word appears as part of another word.
- Comment Blacklist – Similar to moderation, but comments matching the blacklist rules are automatically discarded.
- Avatars – Enable avatars for commenters, including selecting a default avatar and controlling whether ratings are shown.
