Other comment settings

• Comment author must fill out name and email
  

If you want to allow anonymous comments, you can remove this checkmark. The fields for the name and e-mail address will not appear in the comment form.

Only the text box for the reaction itself is then visible under messages. You probably find it nice to know who is responding. By asking for name and e-mail address, you also raise the threshold for spammer

• Users must be registered and logged in to comment
  

This indicates that only logged-in users can respond. This implies that everyone who wants to respond first has to register. If you have a good reason for that, then you should certainly do that.

• Automatically close comments on articles older than xx days
  

If this option is checked, then visitors (in this example) see after 14 days the message "Do not post comments".

• Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels deep
  

If you respond to a first reaction, then the result is a nested response. And one of 5 levels deep. Nested reactions only occur when responding to a reaction. With the option nested responses you determine how many levels a reaction may get. The minimum is two, the maximum ten. An important condition here is that the active theme must support nested reactions.

• Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default
  

If you get a lot of reactions to messages, you can divide those reactions over multiple pages. A disadvantage is that users have to browse. A possible advantage is that the loading time of the web page is shortened. Here you indicate how many reactions you want to show per page. In the above example there are 50.

You can also state your preference which page is shown first; the last or the first.

If you choose the 'last', visitors will first see the most recent reactions and otherwise the oldest ones.

• Comments should be displayed with the older-newer comments at the top of each page
  

This determines the sorting of responses to old age. Depending on your choice, therefore, the first (the older) or the last (the newer) reactions will be shown first.

If you opted for 'last' in the previous option, then it is obvious that you choose 'newer' here. The last reaction is at the top and the further a visitor descends on the page or leafs, the older the reactions become.