Last updated - July 8, 2021
Comments are an important part of your website. They help in enhancing user engagement for your content. Your readers will be able to share their opinions and clear any doubts by leaving a comment in your post. Moreover, the number of comments could be a valid measure of user engagement in your website or blog. For all these reasons, it is important to know the options to edit the comment field in your WordPress website. In this article, we will discuss how you can edit the WordPress comment field.
WordPress comments overview
Since comments are one of the crucial aspects of a WordPress website, you have to pay extra attention to manage your comment strategy. You will be able to specifically enable or disable comments on your WordPress posts and pages, and also control the approvals of user comments. Since the comments section is a major target of spam, you could face several challenges from the comments section. We will look into all the different aspects that comes into play while editing the WordPress comment field.
Comments section
WordPress provides comment moderating capabilities to Administrator and Editor user roles. So, if you have logged into the website with either of these user roles, you will be able to see all the comments in your website. You can access the Comments section from the WordPress admin panel.
The Comments section will display all the available comments with their status.
Here you can filter the comments based on a few options. You can view only the comments posted by you by clicking ‘Mine’. Similarly, you can filter ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’, ‘Spam’, and ‘Trash’.
Pending comments are those comments posted by users, but you have still not approved them. So these comments won’t be visible on the frontend. Approved comments will be visible on the frontend of your site. Spam comments are those that you have marked as not relevant, and will not be visible to users. Trash comments are the ones you have deleted. They will be permanently removed after 30 days.
How to edit WordPress comment field?
You can move the cursor to a specific comment in the section, and a bunch of actions will be displayed. They are:
- Approve/Unapprove – If the comment is pending approval, you can click ‘Approve’ to make it live. And, if the comment is already approved, there will be an option to ‘Unapprove’ to change it back to Pending status.
- Reply – You can choose to reply to a comment from this section. When you publish a reply to a comment, it will be visible under that specific comment.
- Quick Edit – If you want to quickly edit a comment without loading the page, you can use this option.
- Edit – Use this option for a detailed edit of the comment. You will be able to modify the comment text as well as edit username, email, url, etc.
- Spam – You can mark a comment as spam here. If you have marked a comment as spam by mistake, you can mark it as ‘not spam’ here.
- Trash – You can move a comment to the Trash folder by clicking this option. You can go to the Trash section and Restore the comment if needed, or delete it permanently. Comments in the Trash section will be automatically deleted after 30 days.
Bulk edit comments
You can apply the same action to multiple comments simultaneously. Select multiple comments and choose the bulk action that you need to execute.
Restricting comments
If you are a WordPress administrator, you will know how of much of a hassle spam is. WordPress, by default, offers several options to restrict comments.
On your WordPress admin panel, you can go to Settings > Discussion to access different settings for restricting comments. We will look into these settings in more detail below.
Default post settings
Here you can control the comments strategy for new posts on your site. When you create a new post, by default it will allow comments, if you have enabled the option to “Allow people to submit comments on new posts”. If you don’t want any comments on your site, you can choose to not enable this option. However, you will be able to override this for individual posts.
You can also enable links from other blogs to be displayed as comments.
Other comment settings
There are a few other comment settings that will help you control your comment strategy. These can be managed in the next section.
You can enable an option to make it mandatory for guest users to enter their name and email before posting a comment. Or, you can allow only registered users of your site to comment. If you leave these two options unchecked, anonymous users will be able to comment on your site.
You can also specify the number of days before comments option will be closed for a blog. Here you can enable an opt-in checkbox for cookies. There is an option to define the depth of nested comments. Furthermore, you can control the order of display of comments when there are a lot of comments.
Notifications and manual approval
You can define when you want to receive notifications. It can be either when ‘Anyone posts a comment’, or ‘when a comment is held for moderation’. You can also choose an approval strategy suitable for you. Either you can make all comments to be manually approved. Or, you can let users with previous approved comments to post a comment without moderation.
Comment moderation and disallowing comments
There are a few ways available that will help you reduce spam comments on your WordPress site. If a comment has more than the specified number of links, it will be held in a queue.
Also, you can keep comments in the moderation queue, or directly send them to thrash based on certain specified words. You can enter the words, and if the comment’s content, email, author name, IP address, URL, etc., it will be held in moderation or will be sent to spam.
Avatars
There is a section that lets you display gravatar of users next to the comments they have posted. You can also choose a default avatar for those users who don’t have a gravatar set up.
Allowing comments on individual posts
You can open a post edit page, and allow or disallow comments from the Discussions section of the settings toolbar.
There is also an option to allow or disallow comments in the Quick edit section as well.
You can also use the bulk edit option to allow comments for multiple posts at the same time.
How users are able to add comments?
From the site’s frontend, customers will be able to add a comment by adding their name and email id.
More customization options for the comments section
As with most other features, you can customize the comments section too. With the help of code snippets and plugins, you can manage the following options:
- Removing and rearranging comment fields
- Changing the style and layout of the form
- Modifying the displayed text
- Show only an excerpt of the comment
- Inline commenting
- Social login
- Allowing users to edit their comments.
We hope this article has provided you with some interesting options to edit the WordPress comment field. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any queries.
Nice blog. Thanks for sharing.
I was just searching for how to edit WordPress comments and luckily my friend recommends me this blog, however, thank you for providing essential information.
Editing the WordPress comment field is necessary for me. Understood every point very clearly. Very thorough explanation Sujith.