To generate interest in your blog, what you is to maximize interactions with your readers through their comments. Most of your visitors will simply leave a message. You should read the comments and respond to any questions there in, or just join the conversation.

In addition, authors of other blogs can leave comments without even visiting the blog! These are called “pingbacks” or “trackbacks”, and they basically inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. This means tht online conversations are painless among various site users and websites.

Managing Comments

Sometimes you will get weird comments and you may need to moderate and manage comments and deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

We’ve set the system on WildlifeDirect to hold in moderation any comment with more than 1 URL. These comments are highlighted in the dashboard and you can check them and delete the spam and approve any genuine

Trackbacks

TrackBack provides notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. A better explanation is this:

Person A writes something on their blog.

Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog

Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog

Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog gets posted along with all the comments.

Pingbacks 

These are similar to trackbacks but do not contain any content. The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments: A Pingback is another type of Linkback, or methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Wordpress have automatic ones so that all the links included in a blog post can be pinged when it is published to related links . You can learn more about trackbacks and pingbacks here

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