Comments

The Comments module lets visitors discuss your posts and pages on your own site. Comments are stored in your own database, with no third party, no tracking and no outside script. It arrived in 1.17.0, is free, and is off until you enable it.

Turning it on #

1. Enable Comments under System ▸ Modules.
2. Blog posts take comments straight away; switch them off or close them in a post's editor. A page takes comments when its Layout allows them.
3. Choose who may comment, and what waits for a moderator, on the Settings tab of the Comments page.

Who may comment #

Members can always comment while comments are open. Guests can too if you allow it: they give a name and, if you ask for one, an email address, which is never shown publicly. A guest's form carries no session, so pages with comments stay cacheable.

Spam and moderation #

• A spam gate catches bots with checks a person never notices, and reCAPTCHA if you have set it up. A suspicious comment is held for a moderator rather than refused, so a real person is never turned away by a mistake.
• Hold rules decide what waits: a commenter's first comment, comments with links or words you list, or every comment.
• One moderation queue with tabs for Waiting, Approved, Spam and Bin. Approve, mark as spam, bin, reply or edit, one at a time or in bulk. Moderating needs the Moderate comments permission; the settings need Manage comment settings.

Replies and members' own data #

Members can ask to be emailed when someone replies to them. Under Your comments (/comments/mine) a member sees what they wrote and its status, and can download all of it. When an account is deleted, its comments stay as "Deleted member" with nothing left that points to the person, or a moderator can choose to delete them too. A guest's comments can be erased by their address from the queue.

Coming from Forums #

Before 1.17.0, Blog comments lived in the Forums module. When you update, every existing comment is copied into Comments with its date, author and replies. The forum topics stay where they were, as a backup. Update Forums to 1.17.0 with tilspire: the copy waits until it is. Since 1.17.2 the copy finishes on its own, from visits to the site, with no cron line. Until a later release, Give comments back to the Forums in the Comments settings undoes it.

For theme authors #

A theme shows a post's or page's comments through the Template API, and tilspire fills in a working comments block for a theme that doesn't draw its own. See the Template API.