How to Allow Users to Report Inappropriate Comments in WordPress

Do you want to allow users to report inappropriate comments in WordPress?

To help keep their audience safe, platforms such as Facebook allow users to report inappropriate comments. However, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in reporting feature so it isn’t always easy to remove offensive, rude, or hurtful comments from your website.

In this article, we will show you how to crowdsource comment moderation by allowing users to report inappropriate comments in WordPress.

Why Allow Users to Report Inappropriate Comments in WordPress?

Despite having tools to combat comment spam in WordPress, trolls often find ways to post their negative comments on your blogs, especially if you allow users to post anonymous comments in WordPress.

Offensive, rude, and hurtful words appearing on your website can damage your brand image and negatively impact your business.

To keep your community safe, you’d have to read every comment to make sure that negative comments don’t find a way through your website’s filters and defences.

This is extremely difficult if you don’t have the resources, or get lots of comments. Thankfully, you don’t have to do anything drastic, such as completely disabling comments.

By allowing users to report inappropriate comments, you can crowdsource this task to your readers, similar to what we see on Facebook.

You can save time by letting your community report inappropriate comments, ready for you to review and remove. If you allow users to report or flag comments, then you can often respond to offensive comments more quickly and help protect your brand image.

This can make your website a more positive and enjoyable place for visitors, which will encourage them to get more involved in your website. This can help you get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can easily allow users to report comments on your WordPress blog.

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Allowing Users to Report Inappropriate Comments in WordPress

The best way to allow users to report inappropriate comments in WordPress, is by using Zeno Report Comments. This plugin automatically removes flagged comments from your site and places them in the moderation queue ready for you to review.

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the Zeno Report Comments plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to the Settings » Discussion page in your WordPress admin area. Here, scroll to the ‘Allow comment flagging’ section and check the box.

After that, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

Once the page refreshes, you’ll see some new settings under ‘Allow comment flagging.’

First, you’ll see a ‘Flagging threshold’ option. This lets you set a number of reports before a comment is flagged for manual review. We recommend setting this to 1, but you can use any number you like. For example, if your audience are flagging comments that you’re happy to have on your website, then you may want to increase the threshold.

By default, Zeno Report Comments will send you an email every time a comment needs manual moderation, and every time a user reports a comment. These emails can help you remove offensive comments more quickly, but they can become overwhelming if your site get lots of comments.

You can disable these emails using the checkboxes next to ‘Administrator notifications.’

If you disable these emails, then we recommend reviewing your comments every day.

When you’re happy with how the plugin is set up, make sure to click on the ‘Save’ button.

Now, if you visit your blog you’ll see a new ‘Report comment’ link beneath each comment. Users can report a negative comment by clicking on this link.

When a user reports a comment, the plugin will show a message confirming that you’ve received their feedback.

This lets them know you’re taking their report seriously, which is a great user experience.

As soon as a comment’s report count reaches the flagging threshold, it’s sent to the moderation queue for a site administrator or editor to review.

You can now delete or re-approve the comment.

For more information, please see our complete beginner’s guide on how to moderate comments in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you to learn how to allow users to report inappropriate comments in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to allow user registration on your WordPress site and our expert pick of the best contact form plugins.

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