Step 13 - Discussion WordPress Settings

You may or may not want to have comments on your site. Set up the settings on this page as you wish, but if you have comments then be sure the options mentioned below are unchecked.  Failing to do this will encourage your site to be spammed.  

That said, to minimise form spam, make sure you've installed the Cloudflare plugin mentioned on my WordPress plugin recommendations page.

If allowing comments, I prefer to set all comments to manual approval. Otherwise you leave yourself open to spam or derogatory/embarrassing comments on your site. This will be a huge pain though if you get a lot of comments. I think comments are less expected than they used to be and really are just an invitation to spam. My advice would be to switch them off altogether.

Turn Off Or Turn On WordPress Comments

Go To Dashboard → Settings → Discussion.

To turn off comments altogether simply ensure this option is unchecked.

• Allow people to submit comments on new posts

Please note that this will not turn off any existing comments, only those on new posts. But if you are building a Seed site then there should be no existing posts of comments if you've followed the steps.

Limit Link Spam

Also do the following whether you are allowing comments or not.

Make sure the following options are unchecked.

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts

Limit Comment Spam

If you are allowing comments, make sure one of the following options is checked. 

• Comment must be manually approved 
• Comment author must have a previously approved comment

The other options on this page are up to you.