Moderating comments

Now that we've thoroughly explored the settings for which comments need to be moderated, let's discuss what you actually need to do in order to moderate comments. Moderating means that you look over a comment that is in limbo and decide whether it's insightful enough that it can be published on your blog. If it's good, it gets to appear on the frontend of your website; and if it is bad, it's either marked as spam, or gets deleted and is never seen by anyone but you, and the person who wrote it.

To view comments waiting for moderation, navigate to Comments from the main sidebar of the WordPress dashboard. If you have any comments awaiting moderation, there will be a little number in the main menu telling you how many comments are awaiting moderation:

This main Comments page is fully featured, just like the Posts page. For each comment, you see the following information from left to right:

• Commenter avatar, name, website address (if there was any given), email address (if there was any given), and IP
• Comment text, along with links to approve it so that it shows up on the site (the links appear when you hover your mouse over the comment); you can also mark it as Spam, Trash it, Edit it, Quick Edit it, or Reply to it
• Comment submission time and date
• The title of the post on which the comment was made (which is also a link to edit that post), a number in parentheses indicating how many approved comments are already there for that post (which is also a link that will filter the comments list so that it shows only the comments for that post), and a link to the post itself (labeled View Post)

Comments that are awaiting moderation have a reddish background, like the first comment in the preceding screenshot.

You can click on the Quick Edit link under any comment to open its quick-access options. This will allow you to edit the text of the comment and the commenter's name, email, and URL.

You can use the links at the top—All, Pending, Approved, Spam, and Trash, to filter the list based on those statuses. You can also filter either pings or comments with the All comment types pull-down filter menu. You can check one or more comments to apply any of the bulk actions available in the Bulk Actions menus at the top and bottom of the list.

Another quick way to get to this page, or to apply an action to a comment, is to use the links in the email that WordPress sends you when a comment is held for moderation (provided you've selected that option in the Settings | Discussion panel).

Additionally, this listing is where all pingbacks appear for moderation. From a blog owner's point of view, pingbacks look just like any other comments, which means that you can edit them, mark them as spam, or trash them like you normally would with standard comments.