How to Add Comments Section and Manage Comments in Weebly?

Comment control is an important requirement for any blogger to avoid getting spam comments. Weebly offers an easy way to create your free blog and provides a simplified comment management system. You will have a complete control for accepting and moderating comments on your blog. In this article, we will discuss various comment control settings available for blogging and manage comments in Weebly.

Managing Comments in Weebly

In Weebly, there are some settings you can setup for the entire site while few options are there for individual blog posts. You can group all available options under the following categories:

• Global comment setup
• Comments for single blog post
• View and manage comments from users

Global Comments Setup for Weebly Blog

After adding a blog page in your Weebly site, go to “Settings” section to find a new option called “Blog” available. This “Blog” settings will have “General” and “Comments” sections. You can customize blog appearance under “General” section and control comments under “Comments” section. All the settings you make here will affect your entire blog section.

Note that whenever you open the blog page in the editor, Weebly will show you few options on bottom section. You will see the three options as shown in the below picture and clicking on the “Blog Settings” button will take you to the same settings page as shown above.

Let us explain the options available under “Comments” settings in detail.

Commenting System

You can choose which commenting system to use for your blog from the “Commenting system” drop-down. Weebly provides three options – Weebly’s default commenting system, Facebook commenting plugin and Disqus. For Disqus, you simply need a shortname from your Disqus account and set the comment visibility to show or hide.

For Facebook, you do not need any additional account details from Facebook. Simply enable Facebook and set the visibility, number of comments and sort order.

When you change the commenting system, you need to publish the site for the changes to take effect.

Note: Weebly does not offer commenting for pages. DISQUS is the famous and easy to install commenting system which can be used in any Weebly page. Learn more about installing DISQUS on your Weebly site. You can also use Facebook commenting plugin on Weebly pages.

In this article, we will focus on Weebly’s default comment system which will look like below on your published site.

Comment Default

Set the default option of open, closed or require approval for comments. Selecting close option here will disable the comments in your blog. Require approval needs your approval before the comments are displayed on live site. We recommend selecting “Require Approval” option to avoid spam comments are automatically published on your blog posts.

Auto Close Comments

The default option for auto closing comments in Weebly is “Never” which means users can post comments on any articles regardless of the published date. However, you can stop receiving comments after certain number of days from the published date of blog post by selecting the appropriate period from the drop-down. You can choose after 30 days, 60 days or 90 days from the published date of an article to automatically close the comments for that article.

Spam Protection

In order to control the spam comments you can enable CAPTCHA code for your blog. Weebly allows you to add smart CAPTCHA which will only show when there is a suspicious traffic and not for all users. User will see Google reCAPTCHA image verification and need to select the correct images to pass the verification and submit comments.

However, you can also choose “Never Show Captcha” option to disable it which we do not recommend.

Spam Moderation

Similar to CAPTCHA, you can enable or disable comment moderation to manually approve the submitted comments. Weebly’s smart spam moderation option automatically filters the spam comments and display it in a separate spam section. After submitting a comment, user will see a small notification below the comments form saying “This comments is currently being held for moderation awaiting approval”.

You can also disable comments moderation which is not recommended to avoid spam comments.

Notify me of new comments

If you want to receive a notification whenever a new comment is entered in your blog then choose the option “Yes” and enter your email id in the next text box.

Subscribe to Comments

Weebly does not offer any options to disable fields showing in the comments form. For example, you can’t disable the “Notify me of new comments to this post by email” option. This option is helpful for those who want to receive email notification to follow the updates happening on the blog post. However, Weebly will send a email verification which user needs to confirm for subscribing to post comments.

After confirming the email, user will see a “Request Confirmed” message as below indicating email will be sent whenever a new comment is posted on the subscribed post.

Unfortunately, you as a site owner can’t view all subscribed users to manage them.

Comments Settings for Single Blog Post

During creation of a blog post, click the “Post Options” button to see additional blog options as shown in the picture below. Here also you have an option to control the comments by selecting “Open”, “Closed” or “Require Approval” option from the “Comments” drop-down. This option will supersede the global settings and applicable only for the selected blog post. For example, you can accept comments globally but close for a single blog post using this setting.

Managing Blog Comments in Weebly

You can view the submitted comments by clicking on the “Comments” button which will appear in the editor when you open the blog page.

Comment management provides various options like viewing, approving, deleting and marking the comments as spam. Each comment will be shown along with the IP address of the client which helps to identify the origin of the comment. You can also select multiple comments and process at once.

Disadvantages of Weebly’s Comment Control System

Weebly offers a simple commenting setup for your blog. Though the settings are sufficient to manage comments, followings are some of the drawbacks we noticed:

• Weebly does not allow social login options like using Google account for commenting.
• There will be no profile or avatar picture shown in the comments displayed on your blog.

• CAPTCHA setup uses Google reCAPTCHA which may not work if Google services are blocked in user’s country. Unfortunately, there are no alternate options like showing simple CAPTCHA image or a math question in comments form.
• You need to manage submitted comments in a congested pop-up window which can easily annoy you when you have lot of comments to approve.
• There are no options to view and manage the comment subscribers.