This screen allows the management of the comments, avatar and the links to your pages/posts. It also provides an option to set the circumstances in which your blog will send an email notification of certain events at your blog.

Default Article Setting

This settings can be overridden for individual posts.

  • Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: Clicking the checkbox will enable you to receive pingback notification. This means your mention of someone's site or article will let them know in their comment section if that allows pingbacks.
  • Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks): This allows you to either enable or disable pingbacks and trackbacks from the sites which have referenced your site or article. If this option is checked your pingbacks and trackbacks will appear in the comment section.
  • Allow people to post comments on new articles: You can check this box if you wish to allow comments to your post. By making an article private you can control the comments, which would require a password before a comment is allowed.
Other Comments Settings include
  • Comment author must fill out name and e-mail: You can check this option if you wish to receive authors name and email address. It also helps in reducing the number of spam comments.
  • Users must be registered and logged in to comment: Check this box if you want to have comments only from the registered or logged in users. 
  • Automatically close comments on articles older than [X] days: Check the box and enter the number of days after which you don't want to have more comments.
  • Enable threaded (nested) comments [X] levels deep:  You can enable this option in case you wish to have the threaded comments and can then select a number from the drop-down box in order to define the level of depth for the nested comments.
  • Break comments into pages with [X] top level comments per page and the [last/first] page displayed by default. Comments should be displayed with the [older/newer] comments at the top of each page: Check this box to have the pagination for your comments, this further allows you to select the number of comments per page, the order of pages i.e. either "first to last" or "last to first" and in each page whether the new comments or old comments need to be displayed first.
EMAIL me whenever

This option helps in keeping track of the number of comments made on the post and the comments that are held for moderation. This is a useful way for the post authors and administrators to have control over the comments that have been made by getting notified for the available options.

  • Anyone posts a comment: In this case author of the post will be notified for all the comments that are made on the post. But one thing is to keep in mind that in case you receive more comments on the post you will find your email completely full.
  • A comment is held for moderation: In some cases a post may have multiple authors and each on is authorized to accept or decline the post. Then as a owner of the site you can review what comments are allowed or denied. Notifications are received on the email listed in Administration > Settings > General option.
Before a Comment Appears
  • An administrator must always approve the comment: Check this option if you wish that a comment must be approved prior of its publication by the blog user or the person assigned with the proper role to approve comments.
  • Comment author must have a previously approved comment: This is to make sure that the comments are only posted if the email id matches with the previously approved comments email id otherwise the comment will be held for moderation. Those email addresses which are placed in the blacklist are held for moderation even if they are showing white list status.

Comment Moderation

To deal with comment spam properly two more options are provided:

  • Hold a comment in the queue if it contains [X] or more links (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.): 

In the recent past, spammers would have five or ten hyperlinks in the comments. This would make easy for the bloggers to identify the spam comments but nowadays hyperlinks have been reduced to one or two. But using this option you can specify the number of links that you want to show in the comment before holding it for the comment moderation.

  • When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so "press" will match "WordPress":

In the space provided, you can add the spam words which will help you in filtering the comments.

Comment Blacklist

When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so "press" will match "WordPress".

This option implies to delete all the comments without warning, that contains matched words. This should be considered as last option, otherwise you may end up losing some genuine comments.

Avatar

An avatar is an image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on avatar enabled sites. Here you can enable the display of avatars for people who comment on your site.

  • Avatar Display: Check the box to display the avatar.
  • Maximum Rating: This means the highest rated avatar will be allowed to be displayed.
  • G: Suitable for all audiences
  • PG: Possibly offensive, usually for audiences 13 and above
  • R: Intended for adult audiences above 17
  • X: Even more mature than above

Default Avatar: You can choose an avatar for users without a custom avatar of their own. The list includes:

  • Mystery Man
  • Blank
  • Gravatar Logo
  • Identicon (Generated)
  • Wavatar (Generated)
  • MonsterID (Generated)
  • Retro (Generated)

Save Changes: You can click the save changes button to ensure your changes have been saved in the database. Once you click this button a box will appear at the top of the window confirming your changes.