The Discussion settings page contains a fair few settings related to your posts, comments and avatars. It may look like a lot but as you will see breaking it down step by step it is pretty easy to follow. Your Discussion settings page looks like this…

Lets go through these settings one at a time.

Default article settings
Here we have 3 settings…

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
  If this is checked WordPress will attempt to notify (ping) any site or article you link to in your post. If the site it pings is set up to receive pings it will show up in the comment section of that site. This can slow down publishing of articles as it can take time to notify the sites linked to.
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)
  If this is checked it will allow pings from sites that link to yours. This is the other side of the above setting (Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article).
• Allow people to post comments on new articles
  If you want people to be able to post comments for your posts then check this one.

These settings can be over-ridden on each post.

Other comment settings
Here we have six settings…

• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
  This lets you set if someone has to fill in their e-mail and name when making a comment.
• Users must be registered and logged in to comment
  This lets you set if users must be registered and logged in to make a comment on your site. If you use this make sure you have set your site up to allow registrations. This can be set in General settings (Membership – anyone can register).
• Automatically close comments on articles older than ## days
  You can set the number of days after publishing an post that comments will no longer be accepted.
• Enable threaded (nested) comments ## level deep
  This setting is dependant on the theme you use as some do not display nested comments properly. If your theme does support it you can set how many levels deep you want nested comments to display.
• Break comments into pages with ## top level comments per page and the (last/first) page displayed by default
  This option lets you specify how many comments to display per page and the order to display them in (newest or oldest comments displayed first).
• Comments should be displayed with the (older/newer) comments at the top of each page
  This lets you specify if newest or oldest comments should be at the top of the page.

E-mail me whenever
Two options here, specifies if you should get an e-mail when someone post a comment and when a comment is held for moderation.

Before a comment appears
These two options let you set if an administrator must always approve comments (handy to stop any spam) and if someone who had previously made a comment that was approved.

Comment Moderation
This lets you set up the conditions that will cause a comment to be held for moderation. The first option lets you specify how many links a comment can have before it is held, the second lets you specify specific words in the content of the comment.

Comment Blacklist
This lets you specify specific words that if included in a comment will mark it as spam.

Avatars
This section is borken into 3 sub-sections.

Avatar Display – Select if you want avatars displayed on your site.
Maximum Rating – Select the rating you would like for the avatars
Default Avatar – This sets a default avatar to display for people who do not have one of their own.