Managing comments

WordPress is a social media platform. If enabled and managed well, it can offer you an excellent platform with which to engage with your audience.

Who can comment?

By default, anyone can comment, but users who are not logged in will have their comments placed in a moderation queue, where you can review, and approve or trash comments. You can adjust the settings in your Dashboard under Settings > Reading.

Managing spam

WordPress sites are spam magnets. People post spam comments in the hope that they can create links back to their own sites and help their ranking in google. If a site is unprotected, it can rack up hundreds of spam comments an hour, so you need protection.

By default, comments are disabled on posts a certain time after publishing (14 days on new sites). This is a useful tool for limiting exposure to comment spam, but you can adjust the setting in your Dashboard under Settings > Reading.

As a second line of defence, our system has a CAPTCHA tool, which will challenge anyone who is not logged in with a ‘type the words below’ field. This is not ideal, and we know that the tool is not very accessible, but we are working to have it improved to expected levels of WCAG compliance.

We also have a third line of defence which identifies and flags spam based on an amazingly efficient algorithm.

So, we’ve done our best to help, but in the end, managing comments is up to the site administrator. Keep an eye on your comment queues because people like to see their legitimate comments go live without too much delay, and it keeps the conversation fresh, and your site engaging.

If we see a comment queue piling up, it’s a sign to us that a site may not be well managed, and may be subject to review under the Currency requirements of our Terms of Service.