Discussion Settings in WordPress Part 2.  I know I told you this is an easy setting to setup and it is.  But I want to be as thorough as possible and five you all the information that is needed.  I just don’t want to overload you all at once.  I know many of you may be binge reading.  And you know what that is great.  

So let’s dive into the 2nd part of Discussions Settings.  

WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings

Under ‘Before a comment appear’ section, the first option is to manually approve each comment. Make sure this box is checked so that no comment can appear on your site without your approval.

Below this you will see the option ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’. If this option is checked, comments from authors that have a previously approved comment will appear without explicit approval. Un-check this option to make sure that all comments are manually approved.

A very common trait among automated spam comments is that they contain a lot of links. Since you have already set your comments to be manually approved, all your comments will go to the moderation queue regardless of how many links they have.

You will see a larger text area where you can enter words, IP and email addresses, or URLs that you want to watch out for. Any comment matching things you enter here will be sent to moderation queue. There is no need for you to enter anything here since you have already set all comments to be manually approved, and they are all going to the moderation queue anyways.

Avatars in WordPress Discussion Settings

The last section on the comments settings screen is for Avatars. These are the images that appear next to comment author’s name on your website. WordPress uses Gravatar, which is a free service that allows users to have the same avatar on all the blogs they visit. When a comment author doesn’t have a Gravatar image associated with their email address, WordPress uses Mystery Man as the default gravatar. You can change this, by selecting a default avatar from the list or even add your own custom default gravatar in WordPress.

That’s all, you have configured your comment settings. Don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.