The comments feature allows anonymous visitors to a site to submit a comment for publication on the site. Visitors must provide a name along with their comment. An assigned moderator will the receive an email communication notifying them of the new comment. They can then review and choose either to delete or publish the comment on the site.
Site owners can submit a request to IT Services to enable comments for their site. Comments are only available for the Article content type. In order to turn on this feature, site owners must:
- Provide the name and netID of the resource who will be responsible for moderating comments. This should be someone with the site administrator role in the site. Please ensure the moderator is aware of the following:
- Comments should be vetted to ensure they don't include offensive, hateful or bad language.
- Although we have tools meant to control spam, we can't eliminate all instances. As a result, moderators should be prepared to receive some spam posts that will need to be cleaned up.
- Depending on how many comments an article may receive, it may be a time-intensive exercise to manage this feature.
- Acknowledge that they are responsible for managing comments and the content that is posted on their site. IT Services is not responsible for the content that is posted there and does not provide services for moderating comments on behalf of sites.
Managing Comments
Comments can be enabled on an article-by-article basis.
- Navigate to the article where you'd like to accept comments (or create a new article)
- In the Comment Settings tab, select "Open". Note: if you don't see this option, it is likely because Comments have not been enabled for the site. Site owners can to have it turned on.
- Click Save for your page. Now when viewing the published and authoring view of the tab, you will see the "Add a new comment" fields. On the live version of the site, visitors should be presented with a reCAPTCHA question (i.e., "I am not a robot").
- When a user submits a comment, the moderators that have been configured for the site will receive an email notification* (Note: if you would like to be added as a moderator for comments on your site, please have your site owner ).
- Login to the authoring environment for your site and navigate to the article that has received a comment.
- Review the comment and click "Approve" to publish the comment to the site.
*There is a known bug that send the live URL in the email notification that moderators receive. To view the comment from this URL, remove "live" from the link URL (e.g., if you receive a notification for a comment at link https://live.wp3.queensu.ca/yoursitewww/comment/28#comment-28, going to https://wp3.its.queensu.ca/yoursitewww/comment/28#comment-28 will take you to the comment)
- A comment can be deleted both before and after it's been published on the live site. To delete a comment, navigate to the page containing the comment
- Click "Delete". You'll be prompted to confirm that you want to delete the comment. If you're sure, click Delete.
If a moderator has changed or you wish to add a new moderator, to IT Services with the user's name and NetID. Please ensure this user has site administrator to your site.
If you decide that you no longer wish to accept comments for an article, you can choose to close them:
- Navigate to the article containing the comments you wish to disable
- In the "Comments Settings" tab, select "Closed"
- Save the page