If you wish to have an active commenting community, Akismet is simply unusable because it censors your best commenters. Because of that and for other reasons, there are three comment systems commonly used: CommentLuv, Disqus, and Livefyre – and each of them can limit but not completely control spam comments.

CommentLuv is what friendly bloggers who believe in paying it forward use and I highly recommend it to those who want to create a better world for all. I will link this comment to a post that explains what CommentLuv is and how it creates community and supports small businesses and local economies.

Livefyre is favored by those who want to get more than they give and I have personally seen it censor controversial content when trying to share using their function for that. I am opposed to censorship and selfishness so avoid commenting in Livefyre blogs which means I rarely read or share them either.

Disqus is middle ground and some bloggers install both Discqus and CommentLuv so their commenters can choose which to use.

Facebook also has a commenting system, but I would definitely avoid that because if they decide to delete your account – which they sometimes do for no reason (just search for Facebook account deleted to read the horror stories) – you would lose your commenting system and probably all your comments and replies, too.

Each blogger should visit the popular blogs in their niche that use each commenting system to see where they best fit and whose audience would also be theirs. Each system has pros and cons and only the individual blogger can decide for themselves which fits their ethical standards and world view.

There are about a hundred points I could make… but I’ll only make a few.

First, when copying text from Word to WordPress, I’ve always written in notepad and then copied to Word for a spell-check. It’s just as easy writing in Word (without formatting) and then “saving as” text. You would then copy text over to your visual editor and apply all necessary formatting. There are a few ways of doing it… but none easier than starting with notepad or a text editor to start with.

Re your spam worries, Akismet is included with every WordPress default installation, but it does require a little work on your part to get an API key (from here: http://akismet.com). It’s the very first plugin I activate on any site. It’ll recognise spam and filter it away based on conditions common to nonsense posts. Every time you mark a comment as spam, the remote system will learn from its mistakes and then apply scrutiny to other comments with the same definition. You’ll probably learn about it next week. It stops at least 99% of all the crap on most of my sites, and it filters away very few genuine posts (if any).

Permalinks are simply an easy way of customising the URL structure of your blog. You’ll note that – in terms of what each post address looks like – I go by way of internoetics.com/year/mm/dd/post-name. It was set up some time back and I’ve come to regret my decision in minor ways. When I installed your site, I set it up as KarlenePetitt.com/post-name (not the absence of the date.. this is the ‘post name’ option). The URL is shorter and tends to maintain currency – even when it’s a little dated – by virtue of the fact there’s no indication of when it was written in the URL. The only reason I haven’t changed this site over to the new permalink structure is because I didn’t want to worry about redirects… and I didn’t want to lose Twitter counts, FB shares etc that are all attached to a very specific address.

In a few months I’ll be starting a new site at BeginnerBloggers.com. I’ll guide new bloggers like you through every single step of the journey in a language that you’re likely to understand. Internoetics has always been for people that have overcome that initial learning curve.

There’s lots to learn. You’ll love it. Enjoy!

Thanks!