Writing blog posts that result in your readers commenting on the post is a good sign. If you are a fairly new WordPress blogger, any traffic and interaction from comments on your WordPress blog are exciting to see. It means you are starting to get some results and traffic. If people are leaving comments you are also also doing something right to encourage it.
But what if the comments are not showing up? Where are they going? If I setup your blog for you I most likely added and activated the comment spam plugin called Akismet. Akismet is one of those set it and forget it plugins. There is no filter adjustment, that I know of, for it and you must monitor the comments to make sure it isn’t stopping legitimate comments from real visitors.
Akismet does a great job of catching comment spam, especially from those automated comment scripts. But it may be blocking some of your readers comments too, especially if they include a link inside the comment. To check your comment spam, from within the WordPress Dashboard click Comments and then under that click the Akismet Spam subpanel.
The Akismet spam subpanel is where you will find all the comments the plugin caught as spam, and there may be some legitimate real comments in here. In here is where you can moderate all the spammed comments.
If you find that too many real comments are getting flagged as spam you my want to consider switching to a more configurable WordPress spam plugin like Spam Karma. It is a highly configurable comment spam plugin that you can experiment with and adjust to your liking. I just installed it on this site and so far it has done quite well.
Hey guys, good post! But, I don’t have Akismet installed and I am just having a difficult time figuring it this time—yep, done it before! Sometimes it could be the theme, sometimes it could the setting in the configuration where comments are closed after X days, but those options are not the solution to my problem. Any ideas?