Build My Site for Free

Hi! Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. In this tutorial, I’m going to explain to you the Discussion Settings which can be found in our navigation menu when you open up our settings submenu down here in the lower left hand corner. Now, your discussion settings are basically just for your comment moderation as well as some post notifications. A lot of it is pretty self explanatory, so I’m only going to briefly walk you through a few of them.

Our first section is default article settings. You will check any of these boxes when you want something allowed, and uncheck it when you want it disabled. For our first one, many times you have links to other blogs on your blog. When you check this, it will send them notifications. If you check the second box, you will get notifications when you are linked to their blogs. Often this is ping backs and trackbacks which we will explain in further videos. This third box, you will check that when you want comments left on your blog. So, if you don’t want any comments left at all, you go ahead and check this. If you do uncheck it, nothing will ever be left by anyone on your blog until you decide to go ahead and change that.

Then next, here we have pretty much the self explanatory settings. These are just really good when you want to try to control your spam. For example, the first one if you check that box, every viewer needs to fill out their name and email whenever they decide to leave you a comment. Same thing underneath, they must be registered and logged in order to comment. These are just really great ways to control your influx of comments and your spam.

The next few are really just how you want your comments formatted. Here you will decide how many you want shown on the page, which is a really great way to organize your comments if you have a large amount being left on your blog, and you can also right here choose if you want the older ones shown at the top or if you want the newer ones shown at the top of each page.

Then, next we have the options where you will get emails if someone posts a comment or if a comment is held for moderation. If you don’t really want to be getting a ton of emails every time a comment is left for you or held in moderation, I would just go ahead and uncheck both of these boxes.

Next, we have our before a comment appears section. These are always set by default. The first one is always disabled by default, and the second is always enabled by default. The first one basically means that you need to approve every single comment that is left on your blog. So, if you were getting a large amount of comments, you may just want to leave this box unchecked. You may just want to keep it where every time that someone leaves a comment, as long as you approve their very first one, they’re able to leave as many comments as they want. They will already be published. That’s what you would do by checking this box. If you do want to approve every single comment, if it’s a way that you do want to try to control the comments that are going to be left on your blog, then you would go ahead and check this. But, it is always disabled by default, so please do remember that.

Next, we have our comment moderation box. This is actually a really cool feature by WordPress because it allows you to type in any email, URL, or keyword that you want held for moderation, so it’s another really good way to control spam. But, also if there is any negative or derogatory comment being left on your blog, here’s a great way to control it. So, anything that you type in this box, WordPress will automatically recognize and hold it in your moderation box, holding it for your approval, which you can go ahead and decide what you want to do from there.

Then, the next is our comment blacklist. Once again, you type a name, URL, email, and anything you type in will never be published. You will never see it. It will already be automatically marked as spam. So, this is also really great if you think you’re going to have a negative comment left, and adult comment which a lot of the time is spam. So, it’s just a good way to control that.

Then lastly, in our discussion settings we have our avatar section. An avatar is just an image that someone has next to their name when they comment on your blog. You can choose to just not even have them shown, and you can also choose to rate what they look like. So, if you have a very kid friendly blog and you’re afraid that certain avatars are not going to be so kid friendly, here is basically where you rate that. It’s the same exact thing as a movie rating. Of course, underneath if people don’t have a custom avatar, you can choose it for them.

Once you are completely done with this, you want to always make sure that you save your changes.