If you use the blog function of your WordPress site as a news feed, or if you are using the Recent Posts widget (like we do in the sidebar, below signups), you might occasionally want to change the order of the posts – either in the blog or the widget.
The ordering of the posts in both of these locations is automatically controlled, and determined solely by the date of publication. Older posts automatically appear at the bottom, while the newest post automatically appears at the top – a “reverse chronological” structure.
To change the order where a post appears, you need to change the date of publication for that post – making it earlier in date than the posts you would like it to appear below, and later in date than the posts you would like it to appear above.
To change the date of publication for post, go to the post editing page, and on the right sidebar, immediately above the blue “Update” button, look for the “Published on:” line. Right beside that will be a blue link to “Edit”. Click this link, then select a new publication date. Be aware that you may have to select a time as well as a date of publish to get your post exactly where you want it.
While changing the order of the posts in the blog or widget might be something you need to do once in a while, you don’t want to end up micromanaging this order too much. Changing the order more than once a month or so might mean that you need to take a look at creating a publishing schedule to be more organized in the order you originally publish posts.
Dealing With Spam Comments
Of course, you can eliminate spam comments by turning off the comments on your posts. To do this on your WordPress site, look on the left menu of the admin dashboard under Settings for Discussion. Under “Default Article Settings”, uncheck the box “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.
But leaving comments turned on can generate some conversation about your posts, which is a good thing. We advise leaving our default setting that before a comment appears on your site, that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. This means that the first time a commenter writes a comment, a notification will go to the post author (by default in WP this is set to the site administrators, but in ACWP, we notify post authors) to approve. After that, comments from that person (identified by their email address) will appear without needing approval.
You can lock down comments a little tighter by requiring that all comments must be “moderated” or manually approved before they appear on the site.
All our ACWP sites use Akismet, a spam filter for blog comments. It catches quite a large percentage of spam comments. But sometimes, you’ll get a notice asking for you to approve a comment that is clearly spam. Your post was about your church’s upcoming pancake breakfast, and the comment thanks you for all your pointers regarding buying used cars.
You might be tempted to just delete (“trash”) this comment, but it’s important to instead mark this comment as spam. Akismet is a dynamic filter, and can “learn” to better identify spam comments when you mark the comments that escaped its filter as spam.
We are discovering that on our church sites we occasionally get comments that seem “too personal” to be approved– not inappropriate, but things that should probably get handled through more private email channels, not out in public on the website. Like someone requesting a refund on an event ticket…
All in all, what we really see is that there aren’t really very many comments at all on the blog-as-a-newsfeed type posts.
What is your experience with blog comments?
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