Internet & Society Course Blog

At times you may want to post a comment on your own blog. The most obvious reason for this would be to leave a response to someone else’s comment to one of your posts.

WordPress leaves you logged on unless you consciously log out of the system. This means that when you go to comment on a post you will not be given the option of filling out the spam guard “blog” line. However, when you then try to submit your comment you will be told that your comment cannot be posted since you forgot to enter the blog word.

To sidestep this problem, be sure to log out before commenting on your own blog. You can usually hit the back button on your browser and retrieve your comment text, highlight it, copy it and then paste it into the comment field once you are logged out.

This is another inconvenience for which spam is responsible.

It is imperative that you active a plugin to protect your blog from comments. If you don’t do this, the costs of maintaining these blogs will go up exponentially.

Here is what you have to do:
1. Log in to your blog
2. Click on the Plugins tab
3. Click on Active (column on the right) for the “Auto-close Comments” plugin (probably listed first on the list of plugins)

You’re done. Seven days after you post a new entry the comments to it will be closed off automatically.

Previously I explained how feeds can help you keep track of blog (and other site) updates.

Here, I tell you the exact address of feeds for your classmates’ blogs in case you want to get updatse about them. (Most feed aggregators/readers do not require you to know the exact feed address, it’s enough to give them the Web site of the blog that is of interest to you. But just in case they require an exact feed address, here is what that is.)

If required to enter the exact feed URL (Web address) of a blog, this is what you enter for class blogs:
http://www.nublogs.com/nameofblog/wp-feed.php
.. where you replace “nameofblog” with the name of the specific blog of interest.

Some of you may have lost the link to your login page due to the theme change. Here is how you find where to log in to your blog.

Go to http://www.nublogs.com/yourblogname
.. where you replace “yourblogname” with your own blog’s handle (remember: all lower case!).

Then append the following to the end of that line: wp-login.php

It will look like this: http://www.nublogs.com/yourblogname/wp-login.php
.. again, where you replace “yourblogname” with your own blog’s name

Here is how you change your settings so comments on your blog do not require moderation.

1. Log in to your blog.
2. Click on the Options tab.
3. Click on the Discussions tab.
4. Under “Before a comment appears:” (third section) uncheck the following:
* An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)
* Comment author must have a previously approved comment
These two should NOT have a check mark next to them.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and press the button “Update Options” to save the changes.

Here is a bit of code that will help protect against spam in the comments. We will add this code to the Comments Template right after this line:
<label for="url"><small>Website</small></label></code>

<input type="text" name="extra" id="url" value="<?php echo $comment_extra; ?>" size="28" tabindex="4" />
<label for="extra"><?php _e("Enter the word blog (required)"); ?></></label>
</input>

UPDATE: There was a mistake in the code that had been posted here originally. There was a superfluous space in between “<” and “?php _e” that caused a problem. Please fix this on your blog.

Also, note that if you have changed the theme of your blog, you may not find the above “Website” line in your code. Nonetheless, look for a line that said Website or URI and place this code below that section.

UPDATE 2 (Oct 3): Please note that an additional section of code needs to be entered in another file. Since you don’t have access to that file, I will enter that snippet for everyone.

Thanks to Jeff Barr for making this available. The code above is a somewhat tweaked version of Jeff’s original.