Chapter 10: Comments: Letting Your Readers Talk Back
In the chapters you’ve read up to this point, you learned to create the two most essential ingredients of any WordPress site: posts and pages. You use these ingredients to talk to potential customers or devoted readers. But you haven’t considered how your readers can talk back.
The answer is the WordPress commenting system. Used properly, comments can change your site from a one-way lecture to a back-and-forth conversation with your readers or customers. Commenting isn’t just a way to make fun friends—it’s also a serious tool for promoting your work, getting more traffic, turning casual browsers into repeat visitors, and even making money.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to manage comments on your site. You can banish offensive ones, insert yourself into the discussion, and integrate with Facebook and Twitter.
Once you understand the basics of comment management, you’ll be ready to confront one of the single biggest hassles that every WordPress site faces: comment spam—the messages that dubious marketers and scammers slap across every site they can find. You’ll learn strategies for preventing spam without aggravating your readers, and you’ll take a side trip to explore the spam-crushing Akismet plugin.
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