Comments are the lifeblood of your DS106 blog. They are the medium where your conversations around your creations should take place. It’s tempting therefore to make your comments open and accessible to anyone. My advice, controversially perhaps, is don’t.

The default settings for WordPress are now to have moderated comments. This is a good setting to leave unchanged, at least at first. You will have to approve the first comment from each new visitor, but it “whitelists” those that you accept so they can post comments without restriction thereafter.

You should also make sure that you set a spam filter for your comments (See the advice given in previous post). The standard spam filter for WordPress is Akismet which is installed by default. The first comment offering to sell my audience a well known male potency drug that shall otherwise remain nameless was posted today. Luckily, having already registered this blog, the Aksimet plugin spotted it and removed it to the spam bucket.

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