Commenting System for WordPress

Nowadays, the commenting systems have been an integral part of a website. These social tools allow you to interact with your viewers- they also provide tools for your viewers to be able to communicate with each other. It is crucial to have the system adequately configured so it can match the need of your viewers. I’ll show you how to start.

In this lesson, you will learn different commenting systems for your WordPress website. When you own a WordPress site, people can comment on your page using WordPress’ native commenting system. If you look under “Settings” and then “Discussion”, you can turn on and off several settings related to your commenting such as; comment authors being required to provide their name and email address, whether they must log in to their WordPress account, or whether to close the comment section after a certain number of days and so on.

People need to provide their names and email address to prevent spam on your website. As a blog visitor myself, I’m often feel discouraged from participating in the commenting system if I see a lot of spams. So we need to anticipate this problem from the beginning.

To see the comments, you can go to the blog page, or you can go to the “Comments” page on the left panel. For now, you can see that there aren’t any comments to review.

This clean look is how the native WordPress commenting system looks. On the blog post titled “Easy and Cheap Garden Boxes”, you can see at the bottom where it says “Leave a Reply” where you got a comment, a name, an email, a website box, and a “Post Comment” button.

Another thing to add is that visitors will have the option to get email follow-ups when comments are made on their comment posts. The native WordPress commenting system is a clean looking box, and it’s always going to match the design of your website. So if you’re going to change to a different theme in the future, it will adjust accordingly.

There are other plugins that you can use to perk up your commenting system. I think you should check them out to see if their features might be of interest to you.

The first one can be found within the JetPack plugin. So we’ve talked about the JetPack plugin for some time now, and I assumed you’re already familiar with it. When you go to JetPack “Settings” and then “Engagement”, you can see that there is a commenting system and you got this little on/off toggle switch. Click to enable. You also have a small drop-down menu to change your Comments Headline. There are also three available appearance settings to choose from; light, dark, and transparent. Click “Save Settings”. 

You can also get back to these settings once you have enabled them. Just go under “Settings” and then “Discussion”, if you scroll down to the bottom you’ll find “JetPack Subscriptions Settings”. You can see the different greeting text, the color options, and also options to turn on and off the “Follow Blog” and the “Follow Comments”.

Now let’s see how these settings are going to appear on your page. On the first tab is the WordPress native, and the other is with JetPack. With the JetPack plugin, visitors can log in with WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus accounts to leave a comment if they don’t want to leave their name and email address. 

Lastly, there’s one other plugin that I recommend, and it’s a popular one. It’s a third-party commenting system called “Disqus”. As you can see, it has more than 200,000 active installations. My advice, try not to look at it solely based on the reviews. Despite the 3-star rating, I think it’s still a pretty decent choice. Please take a look at this videoschoolonline.com, where its commenting system uses Disqus.

Here’s a blog post about 2016 goals, and you can see that it has a few comments already. You can see that you can immediately start commenting if you have a Disqus account. There’s also a button to share your conversation and buttons to upvote and downvote comments. Neat, right?

When you Install Disqus, it will appear under the “Comments” menu and then “All Comments” and then there’s “Disqus” menu. Click it. Now, you can go to the Disqus Moderation Page by clicking the button. This is where I think Disqus has its main drawback; that it has to open a completely new tab to only go to the Moderation Page.

However, you can still moderate comments from the dashboard of your WordPress site. Back on the Video School Online dashboard, if we scroll down, there are new comments that we can approve, not approve, or reply from the Activity Window.

Alternatively, If you want to go through the hassle of going to the Disqus Moderation Page, take the above-mentioned step. Back here, you can manage comments in the different tabs; pending, approved, spam, and deleted ones.

So to finalize, you can look back at what these three different commenting systems look. The first one is the Disqus option, the second one is the one that comes with the JetPack Plugin, and the third one is our old, regular native commenting system WordPress already has. Ideally, for beginners, I’d recommend using the native one since it has a clean look, and it’s simpler to set up and use.

I think that sums up what you need to know about Commenting Systems for WordPress.