Moderation

The approval queue

All comments start in one of three states: pending, approved, or rejected. The Moderation tab in the dashboard shows the pending queue by default.

From the queue you can:

Approve — the comment becomes visible to all readers
Reject — the comment is hidden from readers and marked rejected
Delete — permanently removes the comment
Edit — modify the comment content inline before approving
Reply — post an admin reply directly from the queue

Auto-approve logic

A user’s first comment on a given site is always held in pending until a moderator approves it. Once a user has at least one approved comment on a site, all subsequent comments from that user on that site are auto-approved and go live immediately.

Spam detection and blocked terms checks run before the auto-approve check. A comment that matches a heuristic spam pattern or a blocked term is auto-rejected regardless of the user’s history. It is saved with rejected status so you have an audit trail.

Bulk actions

Select multiple comments using the checkboxes in the queue, then use the bulk action controls to approve or reject all selected comments at once.

Site filter

Use the site selector at the top of the Moderation tab to filter the queue to a single site. By default the queue shows comments from all sites.

Moderation rules

The Mod Rules tab (Pro plan and above on cloud; always available when self-hosted) lets you maintain a list of blocked terms.

Any comment containing a blocked term is auto-rejected on submission.
The author sees “awaiting approval” rather than an error, so the rejection is not obvious.
Terms are matched case-insensitively as substrings.
You can add terms manually or import a list from a URL (one term per line).

The blocked terms list is cached for 60 seconds; changes take effect within one minute of saving.