To add a new User to your blog, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Users > Add New and enter the following information:
    • Username: enter the User’s ONID username (this is a required field and the username must be a valid ONID username).
    • E-mail: enter the new User’s e-mail address.  This is a required field.
    • Role: Choose the role that you want this User to possess.
  • When all information has been added, click the Add User button.
  • A confirmation e-mail will be sent to the new user, who must answer it before being added to the site.
  • Once the confirmation message has been answered by the new user, she or he will appear on the Author’s & Users list.

Manage Users

To change a user’s role, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Users.
  • Check the box(es) next to the desired Username(s).
  • Select the desired role from the Change role to… drop down menu.
  • Click the Change button.

To remove a user, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Users.
  • Check the box(es) next to the desired username(s)
  • From within the Bulk Actions drop down box, select Delete.
  • Click on the Apply button

Within the Authors & Users group, you have the ability to assign role-based permissions to different participants on your blog. The participants must be registered users of blogs.oregonstate.edu.

The five different roles are as followed:

  • Administrator: a user who has access to all of the administration features on your blogsite – grant this with extreme caution
  • Editor: a user who can publish posts, manage their own posts, as well as manage other people’s posts
  • Author: a user who can publish and manage their own posts only
  • Contributor: a user who can write and manage their own posts, but not publish them (these would have to be moderated by a higher role)
  • Subscriber: a user who can read comments, make comments, receive news letters, etc.

Go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#Roles for a detailed explanation of each role’s permissions

To view the registered members of your blog, as well as their respective roles, from within your Dashboard, click on Users – this will automatically open up the Authors & Users list.

Blogs can sometimes grow to be quite busy, especially those blogs that may be run by an organization.

When this occurs, it’s a good idea to add pull in some extra assistance.

The Users feature provides the ability to add different users to your blog.  There also exist different permission levels for different types of Users who may work on your site.

Additionally, the Users menu group is where you can manage your own profile settings.

The Akismet Configuration feature allows you to automatically discard spam comments that come in on posts that are more than a month old.

Most “false positive” comments, those valid comments that Akisment erroneously marks as spam, occur on new posts.

Typically, older comments are targeted by spam agents as these posts “fall off your radar” after awhile – you’re just not as likely to return to posts that are six months old as the topic becomes exhausted.  When spam agents attack these areas, you will receive notification of this repeatedly within your spam queue, which can become an issue for large blogsites.

When this Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month option is enabled, these notifications will not appear in your queue – Akismet will just automatically delete the spam and not tell you about it.

Configure Akismet

To configure Akismet, do the following:

  • From within your Dashboard, click on Plugins > Akismet Configuration.
  • Select the Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month checkbox.
  • Click the Update Options button.