Manage Your Site’s Comments

Your website’s comments section allows visitors to share their opinions and discuss your content. If you have enabled comments, use the information in this guide to view, reply to, delete, and manage comments.

As the site owner, you are in complete control of the comments left on your site. You can view and reply to comments by visiting the post or page directly.

To view and manage comments from your site’s admin area:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Click on Comments in the options on the left.

The number next to Comments in your dashboard reflects the number of pending comments you have yet to approve (if you have set comments to be manually approved in your Discussion settings.)

At the top of the Comments screen, you can view all comments or select from several tabs:

• All: Pending and approved comments made by visitors on your site. Pending comments will appear highlighted in the list.
• Mine: Just the comments you have made on your site.
• Pending: Comments made by visitors to your site, but you have not yet approved to appear on your site. These are highlighted in yellow to make them easy to spot.
• Approved: Comments left by visitors to your site that you have approved to appear on your site.
• Spam: Comments marked as spam.
• Trash: Comments you have deleted.

You can also sort by author name, in response to, or the date the comment was submitted.

For each comment, hover over a comment to perform the following actions:

• Approve the comment to appear on your site. For comments you have already approved, you will see Unapprove instead.
• Reply to the comment.
• Quick Edit a comment to quickly update details about the comment.
• Edit the comment text.
• History allows you to review comment history, including any edits made to the comment.
• Mark the comment as spam.
• Send the comment to Trash to delete it.

You can bulk edit site comments to approve, unapprove, mark as spam or move them to the trash.

Follow these steps to bulk edit your site’s comments:

1. Navigate to Comments in your WordPress.com site’s dashboard.
2. Check the box next to each comment that you want to bulk edit.
   • Or, filter/search for a group of comments.
   • Or, to select all comments on the page, check the box in the header.
3. In the “Bulk Actions” drop-down, select the action you want to take.
4. Click the “Apply” button to apply your bulk edit.

If your site has a lot of comments, it can be helpful to search through all of your site’s comments to find a specific comment you’re looking for.

To search through your comments, follow these steps:

1. Click on Comments in your dashboard.
2. Using the search box at the top of the screen, you can search by keyword, the commenter’s name, or the commenter’s IP address.

From time to time, you may receive unwanted and spam comments on your website.

To remove unwanted comments and spam:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Click on Comments in the options on the left.
3. Hover over the comment text and select one of the following options:
   • Trash: removes the comment from your site and moves it to the Trash section of your Comments dashboard, where it can be recovered within 30 days unless permanently deleted.
   • Spam: removes the comment from your site and moves it to the Spam section of your Comments dashboard, where it can be recovered within 30 days unless permanently deleted. The comment details are also used to train Akismet on new spam patterns.

You can safeguard your WordPress.com site against unwanted comments in several ways:

• You can control whether comments are automatically approved or must be reviewed before publication. This makes sure no comment is visible on your site without your approval.
• You can add rules to either hold comments in the moderation queue or delete them outright based on specified words in the comment content.
• If you turn on email notifications, you can watch those messages for spam and delete them quickly if you find any that get through the comment spam filter.

All WordPress.com sites are protected by the Akismet comment spam filter, which automatically marks spam comments for you. If you notice that your comments are incorrectly marked as spam, please contact our Akismet support and mention that Akismet is catching your comments by mistake.