What Are Comments  In WordPress

What is Commenting.

This is the ability to have viewers leave comments on a site or a blog. It serves as a way for the readers of a website to leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a specific article.

Posting comments is one of the most exciting features of WordPress. It is the interactive part of a WordPress based site.

There are some bloggers who choosed to disable comments on their blogs maybe because they don’t know what are comments in WordPress or because of comment spam or some other reasons. To be candid,allowing comments is essential in any blog that is dreaming of high traffics.

Below Are Some Benefits of Comments in a blog.

1) It creates a dynamic interchange between viewers.

2) It creates room for interactions between visitors.

3) It extends the conversations about the posts.

4) It gives the opportunity to visitors to add to the information posted on a blog.

5) It improve visibility and credibility.

6) It helps build Links over time.

7) Blog commenting drives direct traffic to a blog.

8) It provides ways for author of a blog to interacts with author of another blog without visiting the blog. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks.

What Are Comments In WordPress Concerning Trackbacks and Pingbacks

What are Trackbacks ?

Trackback is a WordPress features to provide a method of notification between websites.

It is a method of person A saying to person B, “You May Be Interested In This.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:

• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants his own readers to see what he had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on his own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
• Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post

The benefit of this is that,more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback comments because they originated from another blog.

Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server.

(Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B’s site that sent the trackback.)

What are Pingbacks ?

This is the method of notification between blogs, but quiet different from trackback.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post.

When you get a pingback from a blog, you will see an excerpt from that blog in the Edit Comments section of your dashboard. The issue is that very few themes display these excerpts from pingbacks. The default WordPress themes, for example, do not display pingback excerpts.

Difference Between Trackback and Pingback.

There is only two significant difference between pingbacks and trackbacks:

> Pingbacks use ( XML-RPC ) while Trackbacks use ( HTTP POST )

> Trackbacks have become the target of so much spam while in Pingbacks the automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Note 1 : Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog.

Note 2 : Some feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

To enable trackbacks and pingbacks, in the Discussion Settings of your Administration Screen, select these items under ‘Default article settings’:

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.

Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles.

Once enabled, trackbacks and pingbacks from other sites will appear in your Administration Screen just like other comments, but on your post pages, they will appear according to your theme’s design.

Once enabled, pingbacks are sent automatically when you publish your post, you don’t have to do anything. To send trackbacks, you will need to find the trackback URL somewhere on the post page you are linking to.

If you can’t find one, try to determine if the site supports pingbacks. If it does, you should not send trackbacks as well. Copy/paste the trackback URL into the Send Trackbacksfield on your Add New Post screen.

If you don’t see this field, go to the screen options and select the Send Trackbacks option. Note that selecting this does not send trackbacks, it only displays the field called Send Trackbacks. When you publish your post, trackbacks will be sent to the URLs you pasted into the field. This field will also show the status of trackbacks and pingbacks on your Edit Post screen

Comment Moderation

This is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions about the comments.

Comment Spam

This refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains.

Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.