Comments on blog posts let your readers share their thoughts on what you're writing. It's a great way to connect with your audience and hear what they think!

In this guide, we'll show you how to handle comments on your Podia blog posts.

Introduction to blog post comments

Comments are a fantastic way to keep your readers engaged with your blog posts.

Whether readers can leave comments depends on if you've allowed comment visibility for each blog post in your Podia account.

When comments are set to Visible, anyone can see and leave comments on your posts. If comments are Hidden, no one will see or be able to leave comments.

To leave a comment, visitors need to have an account. Existing customers can log in with their details, or new visitors can sign up for an account.

If users cannot login and need to reset their password, they can access your Forgot Password page. The link to your forgot password page is yourwebsitedomain.com/forgot-password.

For example, if your website URL is university.podia.com, then your login page link would be: university.podia.com/forgot-password

Managing comment visibility for blog posts

Controlling comment visibility lets you decide whether or not people can comment on your blog posts.

You can set the default comment visibility for all your blog posts, or adjust settings for each post individually.

Now, let's explore how to manage comment visibility on your blog posts.

Managing global comment visibility

Here's how to manage global comment visibility for blog posts:

From your Podia dashboard, click on Settings in the sidebar menu.
Navigate to the Blog settings group.
Click on Edit next to the Default comments option.
Choose how you want comments to display by default on new blog posts. This setting will not impact your existing posts, published or otherwise.
Click on Save to save your changes.

Managing individual post comment visibility

Here's how to manage post comment visibility for individual posts:

From your Podia dashboard, click on Blog in the sidebar menu.
Click on Edit next to the blog post you'd like to manage comments for.
On the blog post edit page, look out for the right-hand menu and navigate to the Details tab.
Under Comments, choose if you would like to make comments visible or hidden.
Once you're done editing your blog post details, click on Publish (if you're publishing your post for the first time) or Update (if you're editing an existing post).

Managing comments

Whenever someone leaves a comment on one of your blog posts, it will show up on your blog CMS page.

From there, you will be able to view the number of comments in each one of your posts.

Clicking on the name of the post opens up a new page where you will be able to view all the comments made on that particular post.

You'll be able to reply to specific comments, or click on the "..." option to delete them.

Comment notifications

You'll also get to control what notifications you want to receive for comments made to your blog, as well as for its replies.

Here's how to control comment notifications for blog posts:

From your Podia dashboard, click on your account name on the sidebar menu and select "Account".
Locate the Notifications settings group and click on Edit next to the Blog option.
Select the checkboxes based on the type of notifications you'd like to receive.