It’s an age old question, do I hold comments for moderation or not? One you need to decide for yourself.
Personally, I have never done it. If you have Akismet set up that will catch most spam, and for any that gets through or the occasional “bad comment” those are easy to delete. There is nothing more frustrating to a new reader of your blog to take the time to comment and have it held for moderation. They want to see it now! And what if you aren’t around to approve it.
It’s very simple to set your WordPress blog to hold for moderation or not. First find “discussions” under your settings menu on the lower left-hand side of your dashboard.
Once you have clicked that scroll down to find this area – “email me whenever”. Here you can choose to moderate or not. Also, you can moderate a first post by a visitor, but after they are approved, their comments will not be moderated. Find this setting under the “before a comment appears”. So to moderate or not, again your own choice.
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WordPress blogging platform within our company and we have Group Blogs with multiple authors. It seems WordPress allows comment moderation on the entire blog and not individual posts. Existing discussion settings only allows Administrator to approve comments or if a user’s first comment ever across any post
How can we moderate comments on an individual posts without blocking comments across any other posts by by respective authors ? Are there any plugins or features within WordPress that allows this
As a usecase, we have a quiz blog in which multiple authors would post questions on the post, expecting followers to answer them by providing comments. If the comments are enabled for a post, the post author should be able moderate any comment display on the same. Any right answers visible early on as comments early on defeats the motivation behind active participation by more people when a post is created and we need the comments to moderated in such a way that the post owner may choose to approve the comment display when he / she wishes to reveal the answer with the results of who all answered correctly.
Yes, I am surprised that there isn’t a plugin that will do this.. let me check it out and if I find something, I will come back and post it.
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I think it’s important to moderate comments, I like to have control on what is displayed on my website. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to display negative comments I always display most of the comments but if a URL is included in a comment I like to make sure it’s ok before it gets published on my site.
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Hey Paul, I talk about this a lot in my blog workshops… and to be honest, I usually recommend people not to moderate, or to at least do the “once approved an author will not be moderated”.
The reason being that if you are quick enough to moderate comments, you are also quick enought to remove a comment in need be. We live in a society where people want “it now” and for many readers, after they have created a thoughtful comment, click post, and get the message that it’s being moderated, there is some level of frustration. What’s even worse is if the blogs author takes more than a day to approve it. Chances are you have lost that reader.. in fact I read somewhere once that you can lose up to 50% of commenters by moderating them.
Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t instances where moderation is a must. For example, a blog that may have a sensitive subject.
But we all have that choice in what works best for us as bloggers. With a combined 8 years of blogging between my wife and I, we have never once moderated comments.
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