After Installing WordPress – Part Four

Discussion Settings:

Default article settings focuses mainly on incoming, outgoing and trackbacks. These are the changes that I make in this section:

Other Comment Settings

Since SPAM is like evil to both you and the Internet you have to be careful whom you approve comments. So be wise and select options which can make or break your blogs reputation.

If you are very particular about who comments in your blog then go ahead and choose the option to let the users register on your site before they can comment.

If you are not going to moderate the blogs comments and if you wish to be carefree about who gains reputation from your blogs old pages (with Pagerank most of the cases) then select the option to close the option to comment on pages which is “X” days old. If you are going for it then I would recommend you to choose 30 days ideally.

In order to let the users to comment on other people’s comments you can select the “Threaded options” to 5 levels deep ideally.

The next option focuses on the number of comments each page displays. As long as you are not receiving huge responses to your articles you can be carefree until the situation changes. You can let the rest of the unmentioned options with default settings.

Email Me Whenever

• Anyone posts a comment
• A comment is held for moderation

It depends on you which options you want it to be checked. If you don’t want to be bothered through email every time someone comments then you can turn it off.A comment is held for moderation when one of the approval criteria is not met. So let it be checked by default.

Before A Comment Appears

• An administrator must always approve the comment
• Comment author must have a previously approved comment

It is self explanatory though you should be careful one small thing, which is very important. If you are going to allow a person’s comment approve the second time there is a good chance that he can take advantage of instant approval. So if you are going to approve each individual based upon a given criteria such as his website link then you need not worry much.

Comment Moderation

The default option disallows a person from commenting with 2 links inside the comment box. I would suggest you to set it to 0 because the comment box has a field to type in a website link.

Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist options allow you to insert specific website addresses, IP or name to classify the comment into a suspicious comment. You can later approve or delete it once it is held in the moderation queue.

You can download this file to update your comment blacklist field to decrease spam comments on your blog:Download Comment Blacklist – Courtesy – prelovac.com

Avatars

Avatars is a nice way to ID a person on the blog commenting world. So this is the reason why I always enable it and make sure I choose the following options:

• Avatar Display: Show Avatars
• Maximum Rating: G — Suitable for all audiences
• Default Avatar: Gravatar Logo (Very Popular and widely used)

So this sums up the Part four of the ongoing series of After Installing WordPress Series the next part is on the way.