Comments on Blogs
Paul Taubman and Pat Iyer
Just about every blog out on the web allow visitors to the blog to post comments on what has been written. These comments may pertain to the blog posting or may be completely unrelated (people say the darndest things!) The comments may also be positive or negative in nature. Regardless of the type of comment left by a visitor, you (as the blogger) may choose to deal with these comments in a number of different ways. You can:
- answer these comments,
- block individual visitors from leaving comments in the future
- use administrative features to delete comments
- set the blog to require approval of the comments before they are posted on the blog.
Let’s talk about these options, shall we?
Answering Comments Left On Your Blog
Bloggers who receive comments on their blog may wish to address and answer comments left by readers. WordPress allows you to post comments on your own blog which enables the you to answer comments directly. With this feature you can deal with a number of different situations including negative comments, positive comments and questions.
If someone leave you a ‘not-so-nice’ or negative comments on your blog, you may opt to answer these comments directly with a rebuttal to the negative comments. This allows you to recognize the criticism and defend your original post.
If someone leaves a positive comment on your blog, you may also wish to answer these comments to thank the visitors for the praise. In some cases, you may receive comments which ask a question about the blog post or about you yourself! In this case, you may choose to answer these questions to develop a better relationship with the blog visitors.
Negative comments or controversy on your site are not a bad thing! In fact, it is pretty good! It shows that people are reading what you are writing, and they are taking the time to comment back! This gets a dialogue started and gets people coming back to your site for more! As I have said before, traffic to your site is a good thing!
Blocking Comments from Individual Visitors
Another option for dealing with blog comments which are negative in nature is to block comments from individual blog visitors. In most cases you have the ability to block a particular user from leaving comments on your blog.
You may wish to use this option in situations where the comments from the blog visitor are extremely mean spirited; you may also wish to ban individual blog visitors from making comments if he/she has the visitor continues to post negative comments. You can decided to ban an individual blog visitor from making comments if he believes the comments are being left as spam.
Comment spam is a very big problem these days.
Using Administrative Features
Still another option for dealing with comments on a blog includes using administrative features to delete comments or modify the settings to not allow comments to be displayed until the blogger approves them.
Blog owners typically have the ability to delete a comment left by a blog visitor. Deleting these comments is quite a simple process.
However, it is not a completely effective method because other blog visitors may have the opportunity to read these comments before they are deleted . Therefore, deleting the comment may prevent some visitors from reading the comment but will not ensure the comment is not seen by any blog visitors. However, there is a way for you to make sure visitors do not read negative comments. WordPress has the option to require the blogger to approve all comments before they become available to the public. This gives the blogger the ability to delete a comment before it is read by any of the blog visitors. The blogger can simply delete any comments they do not wish others to read before the comments are published.
This post was written by guest blogger Paul Taubman. Learn more about LNC websites by signing up for a WordPress course taught by Paul Taubman and Pat Iyer You’ll learn how to set up a WordPress site and blog. Watch the recording at your convenience.