Buttondown's built-in comment feature gives your readers a place to talk with each other and stay connected with you.
Comments slot nicely into the bottom of your newsletter. Plus you can build around them just like you would any other part of your newsletter: filter and store them through the API, set up webhooks to plug comments into downstream services, or fire up an automation to send special content to your biggest fans.
What's more, comments are a great way to improve your newsletter's SEO — search engines love fresh, user-generated content, and we make sure your comments are indexed and searchable through JSON-LD metadata. (We also use rel tags to mark links as user-generated content to make sure your subscribers' content helps out your search engine rankings, too.)
Restricting who can comment
Every email has a commenting mode. It controls who can leave a comment on that email:
- Enabled — every subscriber can comment. This is the default.
- Enabled for paid subscribers — only your paid subscribers can comment. Everybody else can still read the comments.
- Disabled — nobody can comment.
The "Enabled for paid subscribers" option only appears if paid subscriptions are active for your newsletter.
To set the commenting mode for one email, open the Archives section of the email's publish drawer (or the details drawer, if you already sent the email) and change the Comments field.
To set the commenting mode for many emails at once, go to the Emails page, select the emails, and choose Change commenting mode.
You can also set the mode through the API with the commenting_mode field on an email. For the accepted values, go to Commenting mode.
What free readers see
On an email that is set to "Enabled for paid subscribers", a free subscriber sees the comment box, but the button below it says Upgrade to comment. The button sends the reader to your upgrade page. A reader who is not subscribed yet sees Subscribe to comment instead.
Blocking one subscriber
To stop a single person from commenting, open that subscriber in your subscriber list and turn on the Commenting disabled toggle. This applies to all of your emails, whatever their commenting mode is.
Comment moderation
Every comment has a status: active, pending, or spammy. Only active comments are visible on your archive; a reader still sees their own pending comment while it awaits confirmation.
Statuses are assigned automatically:
- A comment from a confirmed subscriber becomes active right away.
- A comment from a subscriber who hasn't confirmed their subscription yet stays pending. It becomes active when they confirm.
- A comment is marked spammy if the commenter is blocked by the firewall, if the text contains a prohibited phrase or a malicious link, or if our spam classifier flags it. Pending comments also flip to spammy if the subscriber becomes undeliverable.
You can moderate by hand from the Comments page: filter by status, then use Mark as active or Mark as spammy on one or more comments — handy for rescuing a false positive or hiding something the automatic checks missed.