Comments in the Encyclopedia of Law

Comments allow your website’s visitors to have a discussion with you and each other. When you activate comments on a Page or post, WordPress inserts several text boxes after your content where users can submit their comments. Once you approve a comment, it appears underneath your content. Whether you want to customize how your receive comments or tweak how your site displays comments, WordPress provides a thorough set of options to build a community from the visitors to your site.

Notification

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: This option will enable your site to automatically notify the sites you linked to that you have linked to them. They can then choose to tell their users that another site linked to them through a trackback or pingback.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.): This is similar to the previous option, only your position is reversed. Instead of allowing your site to notify other sites, you are allowing other sites to notify your site. If you enable this option, pingbacks and trackbacks are managed in a similar way to comments.

Commenter Rules

Allow people to post comments on new articles: This will turn comments on for all future articles. The easiest way to prevent comment spam is to not allow any comments. If you don’t need comments, you can disable them by default by unchecking this option.
Comment author must fill out name and e-mail: This prevents people from leaving anonymous comments (however, people could still use a fake name and e-mail address).
Users must be registered and logged in to comment: This option will only allow registered users of your site to post comments.
Automatically close comments on articles older than _____ days: Closing comments on posts that are no longer active is a good way to limit spam comments. This option will do will allow your site to do this automatically.