Discussion

An Article means either a post or a page. All of these default setting allow your audience to relate to you. Firstly, WordPress will try to notify any blogs to which you have linked.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks allow other bloggers to notify you when they have written something on their blog relating to content you have already written on your – i.e. they have participated in the conversation.

Finally, allowing visitors to Comment directly on your blog says that you are open to conversation. It is almost inevitable that once your blog is found by the spammers then you will get lots of spam comments – but there are ways to deal with that problem that we will cover later.

Making a comment author complete their name and email and identify themselves is a first step to ensure that any conversation is going to be with a legitimate correspondent. However, you will quickly find that there are an awful lot of Mickey Mouses in the world as visitors feed you incorrect names and emails.

Next step is to make users Register and login to your specific blog before they can comment. This is likely to be quite effective in cutting down the rubbish. However, when you are starting out it may be best to stay as open as possible for as long as possible. This blog is left open in order to encourage as much interaction as possible.

The next 3 checkboxes are about controlling activity on a very active blog with lots of comments. If you want to shut down a conversation after a period of time then specify the number of days.

Comments can generate their own levels of conversation between the participants and you can specify if you want these to be nested in their own threads or keep them all visible at the top level.

A really contenious blog post (and being contentious is a recognised tactic for grabbing attention to your blog) can easily accumulate hundreds of comments. Splitting them into pages is simply a way of keeping them more manageable and you can decide whether you want the first or the last page to be displayed. This is mostly a matter of personal taste.

When your blog is new then you will probably want to know about every comment in order to reply to it as quickly as possible and will have email notification checked on. When it gets busy you will probably turn this off and allocate a specific time each day to visit the Comments on your blog and deal with them in the Dashboard.

A comment held in moderation means that the comment has been posted on your blog but is not yet published because of one of the settings you have made below.

Regrettably, there are many blog vandals around who will make spam comments or just inappropriate comments. If you require that you approve every comment then comments are not published until you approve them in the Dashboard. This is why you may have ticked that you want to be emails when a comment is received so that you can visit your Dashboard and deal with it straight away.

As your blog grows so you may have repeat visitors who come back and start to make comments regularly. Where you have built up a degree of trust then you can set this so that comments by an author you have previously approved will be published straight away.

Both of these are intended to control vandals and keep your blog clean. Here you can specify how many links you are prepared to allow in comments on your blog and also what words or phrases you might wish to blacklist so they do not appear at all.

You don't need to worry about avatars at this stage – in fact at any stage. Icing on the cake when you have some time on your hands!

Don't forget to SAVE CHANGES.

Next Setting: Media