 Hello, in this video we're going to be taking a look at the discussion settings options. Most of these are related to how comments are dealt with when they come in from your readers, but some of them have to do with a few other things. So we're just going to go ahead and take a look at those now. Go ahead and select settings and then discussion. Okay, and there's a lot here. I'm just going to run through them, make a few suggestions, tell you some things you can ignore, and make some other recommendations. The first thing right off the top here is the default article settings, and I'll throw in here too that all of the check marks and uncheck marks right now are the defaults. So if I want you to change anything, I will mention that. The first one is attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article. This is something you don't really need to do, but in essence, if, say, you write a blog post and you link to another WordPress blog, it will attempt to let that other WordPress blog know that you linked to them. You can do this if you want to, it doesn't really affect you all that much. Allow link notifications from other blogs, pingbacks, and trackbacks. This is kind of the other direction. So if somebody links to your website, you want to know about it. If so, if you leave this checked and somebody links to you, you will be notified. Now, not always, not 100%, but more often than not. And then this last one here is allow people to post comments on new articles. These are blog posts or pages, really, but by default, this is checked, and I would like you to leave this one checked, please. You want to allow people to be able to leave comments on your content. They might not always do it, but you want to give them the ability to do so. Now, please notice this line here that says, these settings may be overwritten for individual articles. So if you have a particular page or a particular post, you don't want to allow comments on. That is something you can do on a case by case basis. Okay, the next section is other comment settings. Comment author must fill out name and email. They can always lie, but this is something I recommend you keep checked just so a little bit of letting people know that you are kind of paying attention to who's writing what. Users must be registered and logged into comment. Please do not check this one. This would require your patrons to actually sign up for an account in order to be able to leave comments. We don't want them to do that. Automatically close comments on articles over older than, and notice here, this is 14 days. You can change this up or down using these buttons here. Not turned on by default. Personally, I don't recommend you check this. If you do and somebody finds a blog post that's older than two weeks old or whatever amount of days you set, they will not be able to leave a comment. Some bloggers do this just so that people are not starting up a discussion on old content. I've learned not to do this. Sometimes some of my most popular blog posts that have gotten the most comments on them are at this point 3, 4, 5 years old, but the topic is still relevant and people still have things to say. The next one, Enable Threaded or Nested Comments, five levels deep. Again, this is one I would just kind of leave it as the default. Basically what's going on here is if people start replying to other people's comments, it will kind of track what's called the thread. Might not happen a lot, but when it does, leaving this turned on is kind of helpful to make things a little easier to read. Next one, Break Comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default. You can see here you can change last and first. You can up and down this number here. Really, I would say leave this one alone if you actually write something on your website, on your blog, and you start getting 50 comments, things like that. That's a problem to have. Nobody's done it yet, so maybe you can then go in and take a look at this option. But really, probably not going to be something you can run into. And then it says comments should be displayed with the older comments at the top of each page and you can change this to older or newer. This is whether or not you want the comments in chronological order or reverse chronological order. Generally blogs are reverse chronological order, newest post at the top with older posts going down. However, traditionally comments are older at the top, so in chronological order. So when you go to a particular post, you read the post and then you start reading comments. You want to read the comments top down, not bottom up. And in this case, you just leave that as older and that will work just fine. Okay, scrolling down a little bit here, email me whenever and then by default any button posts on a comment or a comment is held for moderation. Now we'll get to moderation in a moment, but I highly recommend you leave these two checked. That way when somebody does leave a comment, you will be notified via email and that will be to the email address that was set up in the settings general screen. Also for moderation, I'm going to suggest you do moderate and so you want to know that a comment is waiting for you to approve it. That's the second check mark here. The next one. Before a comment appears, comments must be manually approved and or comment author must have a previously approved comment. Now these kind of work in conjunction with each other. This first one where it must be manually approved, that is moderation and that's the technical term. In other words, if somebody leaves a comment, you will then get a notification because you've said comments are held for moderation, you get notified and then you can approve or get rid of that comment. And we'll talk about that in the dealing with comments video. So let's say I come to your website, I leave a comment. The very first time I leave a comment, it's going to say, hey, Michael left a comment, do you want it to approve it or not, and that's up to you. The other one here says comment author must have a previously approved comment. What's going on here is if you've turned on moderation, that means that you will approve my first comment. But then once you've approved me once, this second option says from now on Michael will be able to post comments. I don't have to approve them anymore. I can still be notified because of this anyone posts a comment, but I don't have to approve him more than once. I generally leave these alone. I figure most people where if it is spam, if it's something I don't approve of, I'll do that once. But once they've written one good comment and I've approved it, I say go ahead and let them keep writing from that point forward. Okay. Now this next section, comment moderation, hold a comment in the queue if it contains two or more links. In this case, you can up this to three or four. You can set this down to one or zero if you would like to. This is not really relevant at this point because we have checked comment must be manually approved. A lot of these settings overlap with each other. Because we have checked comment must be manually approved, therefore this doesn't necessarily apply unless it's somebody with a previously approved comment. So it kind of cascades through all of these. What this really means is this is going to basically be a spam catcher. Generally somebody who's writing a comment just writes text, doesn't link to anything. Every once in a while, somebody might write a comment and say, hey, you can go read more over here and post a link. But what spam is going to do is it's going to put in link after link after link after link and no actual content. So what this is saying is even if you're moderating, even if they've already been approved, if the comment contains two or more links or whatever number you send here, then hold it for moderation. Again, in all of my years of experience with blogging, I basically would say leave this at two. Then what you can also do is you can specify things like a person's name, a keyword, or an IP address that you automatically want to moderate it regardless of any of those other things. So let's say, for example, I'm leaving comments in your blog and some of them are pretty good and some of them are not so good and things you don't want to actually post it. I wouldn't do that, I promise. I wouldn't do very good stuff. But let's say I'm one of those people where sometimes I'm making a lot of sense and other times I'm really off the wall, whack-a-doodle. You could put my name in here and on its own line and then anytime I submitted a comment where I put my name in the name field, it'll be health and moderation. You could find that somebody is posting a lot of comments from the local Starbucks that really needs to be moderated. If you can figure out what IP address that information is coming from, you can block, you can moderate that. You can also say certain keywords, just to be a bit crude here, I could write the word sex on its own line. And anytime somebody writes a comment where the word sex appears, then it will automatically be held for moderation. Now, compare that down here to the blacklist. What I've done up here, as I've said, anything that mentioned sex will be held for moderation. But if I remove that and I type it in here, then anytime the word sex appears, it will automatically be blocked. You won't even be asked if you want to approve it or not. It will just automatically be blacklisted and it will not go through it all. So you can create a list of words that you want to, that you want a blacklist. To be completely honest, and again, in my experience, don't put thought and effort into this. Know that these tools are available to you and if it becomes a problem, then go ahead and use them. But until there's a problem, I would say just turn on moderation like we've done up here, leave these four options checked, under email me whenever and before a comment appears. Go ahead and leave the number of links at two. And this will catch about 99% of anything that you have to deal with. We do also have some other spam filters built in for things like comments and that on our end of the system. So that is just something that will help you out also. Lastly, there's this section down at the bottom labeled avatars. This is not used all that much. Basically, if I, as a commenter, wanted to set up an avatar with the system called Gravatar, I could do that. And I think I have, actually, I don't really remember doing that. But if your patrons want to do that, they really can. To be honest, it's not really going to affect your site all that much. I would go ahead and leave the show avatars checked. I would leave them at G, just in case there's anything funky in those pictures. And I would leave this at Mystery Man. If you really don't want to deal with it, you can just uncheck the show avatars and then no pictures will show up whatsoever. I generally feel that if they've got a picture, hey, it's great if it shows up. And if they don't, no worries. So I would actually recommend you leave these as the default. As always, in all of these settings pages, there's a Save Changes down at the bottom. So if you have changed anything, go ahead and click that Save Changes to make sure that the changes stick. But to be honest, I think you can leave pretty much all of this as the defaults and know that the options are here, like I said. And then if there is a problem, you can come back and change them accordingly. So thanks for watching.