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How can I moderate comments on my blog?

There are a number of ways of controlling what appears in the comments on your blog entries. Firstly, you can control directly who can comment on your entry by specifying a group of users e.g. only Staff and Students. Of course there are occasions where you would like the wider Internet, who cannot login, to be able to comment on an entry. For this you can use the anti-spam question to ensure that web robots cannot automatically post spam on the entry. This approach is not foolproof however, as a malicious individual i.e. a human who can answer the spam question, could still post comments that you would not want on your blog. For this situation you can use comment moderation.

To enable/update comment moderation:

  1. Browse to your blog and sign-in, if you are not already.
  2. Click on the 'Admin' link in the top-right.
  3. Click on 'Settings.

    You can choose between having no comments moderated, only those from non-logged-in users moderated, or all comments moderated. Comments that are moderated will not appear on the entry until you have approved them.

  4. Change the drop-down labelled 'Approve comments from' to the desired setting.
  5. Click on the Update button updatebutton.gif.

Comments will then be moderated as you have chosen. When a comment is posted that requires moderating you will receive an e-mail. That e-mail will contain the text of the comment so you can view it, then links for you to follow to accept or decline the comment. You can also see comments awaiting moderation on your blog, and there are two ways of doing this.

Note: The content of the comment is only visible in the e-mail notification. You cannot see the comment content anywhere on the blog before it is moderated.

Moderating comments on the entry

When a visitor posts a comment on an entry that requires moderation they will be told 'This comment is awaiting approval by the author of the entry.' You can approve or decline comments on individual entries by following these instructions:

  1. Browse to your blog and the entry in question. You will need to sign-in of you are not already.
  2. Click on the Comments link at the bottom of the entry.

    Each comment that requires moderation will have two links in the bottom right: Approve comment and Decline comment.

  3. Click on the relevant link to Approve or Decline the comment.

Moderating all awaiting comments

If you have a lot of comments spread over a number of entries it may be easier to see all of the awaiting comments on one page.

  1. Browse to your blog and sign-in, if you are not already.
  2. Click on the 'Admin' link in the top-right.
  3. Click on the 'Manage your blog comments' link.

    All of the comments posted to your blog (whether moderated or not) will be shown. For each of the comments awaiting moderation there will be an Approve and Decline link on the right.

  4. Click on the relevant link for each comment to Approve or Decline the comment.