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Discussion Settings WordPress

Initial WordPress Setup – Discussion Settings for a Business or Corporate Website

The Corporate Marketing Team developers use the following Discussion Settings to maximize our clients time. As a rule business and corporate websites do not want to allow discussion on their posts and pages, because the time spent culling through the spam and junk comments could literally take hours each and every day.

We have had customers that allowed anyone to comment on their posts receive hundreds of thousand of spam comments a day. Most spam comments contain links to pull your visitors away from and off of your website and onto one of your competitors or to a totally irrelevant website. We have found that it is best to pick and choose the individual posts and pages that you want to allow your visitors to comment on and not to allow them to comment on all of them.

WordPress Discussion Settings:

Default article settings

  1. Check – Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
  2. No Check – Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)
  3. No Check – Allow people to post comments on new articles

As it says you can choose to check these options on individual posts and pages.

Other comment settings

  1. Check – Comment author must fill out name and e-mail. If you do allow visitors to comment on individual posts or page it is nice to know who they are and how to contact them.
  2. Check – Users must be registered and logged in to comment. If they are registered and logged in you will know who they are.
  3. Check – Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 Days. If you post often this is a good option.
  4. No Check – Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels Deep. We like people to comment on our posts, not comment on comments.
  5. No Check – Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default
  6. Comments should be displayed with the Newer comments at the top of each page.
  7. E-mail me whenever – Check – Anyone posts and comment. Check – A comment is held for moderation. With these boxes checked you will be able to see how much traction any given post or page is getting.
  8. Before a comment appears – Check – An administrator must always approve the comment. No Check – Comment author must have a previously approved comment.

Comment Moderation

  1. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 1 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)
  2. We leave the next large box blank, since most of customers do not allow comments on their post or pages.

Comment Blacklist.

  1. We leave this box blank as well since most of our customers do not allow comments.

Avatars

  1. Your choice on this, for B2B sites we usually say no to avatars, for B2C site yes to avatars.

Maximum Rating

  1. Check – G — Suitable for all audiences. The last thing we want is to offend our potential customers so we always choose G.

Default Avatar

  1. Your choice – does not matter much either way.

Getting the Discussion Settings on your WordPress website correct from the start of your website build will save you and your development team time and headaches later on in the website management process. The correct settings will also ensure that your website is easy to navigate and will also be search engine friendly.

When search engines crawl or index your website the last thing you want is for them to crawl right off of your website following a link left in a comment. The purpose of a business or corporate website is to keep both the search engines and your customers on your website, not following links left in comments and leaving your site. This is why we rarely allow comments on our posts and pages.

Corporate Marketing Team specializes in building custom WordPress websites for businesses. We have built approximately 5000 WordPress websites over the years and our team of professional WordPress developers have the time to build one for you and your company too. Contact us today at 727.401.4266 or complete our online Sales Inquiry Form.