Comments are a critical means of having that important conversation with your visitors. You need to mange the comments in your blog to avoid receiving spam or hate mail.

Bloggers have several options for setting the way comments are to be handled and whether they should be moderated or not (that means whether they should be approved by the blog owner or not).

At WildlifeDirect we set all blogs not to be moderated unless a commentator attempts to leave 2 or more links. This is just one mechanism to prevent spam (we also have other tools). However, you might still have a valid commentator trying to leave more than 2 links because they have some important contribution to a conversation.

You need to monitor these comments which will not appear on the blog, but can be viewed and approved in the back end.

To do this simply log in and look at the right hand side of the dashboard. It will give you information on latest comments. Look at whether there are any comments in moderation. If there are comments in moderation, go to Comments and click on Awaiting moderation. This will allow you to approve, or delete any comment. It’s a good practice to clear your comments in moderation every week or so.

If you are getting comments that are disturbing, hate mail or that kind of thing, or just plain rubbish, you can turn on the moderation by going to Options, and then click on Discussion – here you can change various settings

To make it easy for you to track what’s happening I recommend you try the following settings which will minimize your need to actively manage or moderate

Usual settings for an article:
(These settings may be overridden for individual articles.)

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
• Allow people to post comments on the article