Previously we have seen how to configure and what the purposes of reading settings, writing settings in detail, now we will see how to configure the Discussion Settings and what are the functions of the discussion settings.
To get to discussion settings click on discussion under settings option and it will show up a panel similar to the one shown below in the picture. As there are many options in this page I am posting the screen shot in segments.
Default Article Settings:
you can see around three settings under this option and I will explain about each settings briefly now.
Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.) If you are writing any article in your blog based on the article on some other blog and if you want to show your visitors the real source of the article then you can add a link to the bottom of your article and when you do that, the blog from where you have extracted the idea from will be notified in the form of ping back or track back both practically means the same. Its advisable that you turn this setting off and the reason is already stated in the option itself that it slows down the posting speed but practically I have hardly seen any difference in the posting speed of my blog but this setting also has some other purpose, sometimes you may don’t want other blog owners or your competitors to know that you are blogging so in that case you may turn this off.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) This setting is just the opposite of what we have seen just before, it notifies you when some one link backs to you from their blog post, again its up to you whether you want to be notified or you don’t want to be notified about this.
Allow people to post comments on new articles Frankly you can guess it from the very title of this option, I always turn this on, in my blogs and I also recommend others to turn this on but in some cases you may not want people to post comment on your blogs especially when its new in order to avoid spams.
Other comment settings:
Options under this setting mainly controls the comment settings of your blog and we will go through each option separately now.
Comment author must fill out name and e-mail This option forces the person who wants to post comment to enter his name and e-mail address and makes these options mandatory to be filled in before he can submit the comment.
Users must be registered and logged in to comment This option will only let the registered users to post comments and if the person is not registered yet, he will be forced to register before he can make any comments, this setting might sometimes chase the person away as most people feel lazy to register before they can comment, unless your blog is quite popular I don’t really recommend to turn this option on.
Automatically close comments on articles older than “n” Days This setting can be quite helpful from preventing people to comment on posts that are really old, especially when you run a blog that focuses on current events and you see people commenting news that are more than three months old or even one year old it makes no sense, so its better to turn this setting on if you are running a blog that mainly focuses on current events or news or blogs that comes under that category.
Enable threaded (nested) comments “n” levels deep
This setting mainly helps in getting the conversation going like in forums, for example if someone comments on the comment made by some other visitor then nested comments will be activated so you can set the number of levels this nested comments can go up to, five is fairly enough in my opinion but you need more you can alter the value here.
Break comments into pages with “n” comments per page and the last/first page displayed by default
sometimes it happens many people tend to comment on a particular blog post and the page becomes really long and takes longer time to load, to avoid this problem you can use this setting which breaks the comments in to pages, also this option enables you to alter which page to be shown first under the blog post.
Comments should be displayed with the older/newer comments at the top of each page
This option lets you to choose which comment to be shown up first whether the latest comment to be show up first or the old comments.
E-mail me whenever:
This setting mainly controls the notification setting for the administrator, allows you to be notified when some activities goes with your blog.
Anyone posts a comment Turning this option on will send you an email notification when someone comments on your blog posts, I really recommend to turn this option off as it mostly loads up your inbox, you can always visit your blog to know what’s happening, if your blog is really active then this setting can be really a nuisance.
A comment is held for moderation Highly recommended setting, whenever someone posts a comment, this option will held it under moderation queue so that you can check whether it looks like a spam or related to post and approve the comment accordingly.
Before a comment appears:
Settings under this section mainly controls the moderation of comments and we will see the functions of each option under this one.
An administrator must always approve the comment Setting this option on will let all the comments to go under moderation queue and will not appear until the administrator approved them personally.
Comment author must have a previously approved comment Suppose if the comment author has already made a comment that is approved by the administrator previously then he has the option to by pass the comment moderation and this option controls that function.
I am not going to talk in detail about comment moderation and comment blacklist option because they are more self explanatory when you come across them so no need to waste much on your time on that.
Avatars:
Avatars and Gravatars are increasingly becoming popular, I try to use gravatar on my blogs and I love it, but you can choose the variety of options available under this and test it on your blog, these functions are not so important. You can even choose blank that will prevent any avatars or gravatars to show up in the comments.
Tags: wordpress discussion settings
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I am Chakkravarthi, full time Blogger, webmaster and wordpress enthusiast . Apart from blogging I like to dwell in to SEO world most of the time.Use wordpress and support the open source community.