WordPress was developed for blogs and blogs love comments, thus WordPress has built in comment functions. But maybe you don’t want Joe or Jane Average giving their opinions on your masterpiece – that’s fine.
Or, maybe you want the interaction from your audience, but you want to be assured the discussion remains productive. That’s fine too. WordPress allows you to moderate comments so ultimately you decide what is published or not.
Disabling comments sitewide by default
Comments are very easy to disable sitewide if you choose to do so.
- Navigate to the settings section on the WordPress Dashboard and click on the tab for Discussion
- The first section is titled Default Article settings.
- Un-check “Allow people to post comments on the article” Thats it.
- You can still enable comments on specific posts – like in your blog section.
Turning off comments in Settings > Discussion disables comments by default from that moment forward. So to turn off comments in the posts and pages you made earlier, you need to do it within Edit > Post (or Page) in the WP admin. (read on…)
Enabling/Disabling comments post by post or page by page
When editing a post or page you can enable or disable comments for that post. Look under the discussion field and check or uncheck the checkboxes “Allow comments.” and “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page.”
Threaded comments
WPFolio supports a feature called “threaded comments,” so visitors can more easily keep track of who’s saying what to whom. You can enable threaded comments in the Settigs > Discussion area.
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21 Comments
Hi Steve,
Is there a way to get “Comments (o)” not to show on the home page or elsewhere if there are no comments? It’s kind of visually distracting centered on the home page. Thanks!
Of course, you can disable comments on that, and any, page. (see above for how)
But if you want comments, then you have to have some message that enables people to know they can comment. Right?
The site looks good by the way. Nice work. And i liked the blog post on the process of that floor installation…
Thanks for looking at my site Steve! I have comments turned on for the site, but I didn’t want them for the home page so I have “allow comments” unchecked under “Discussion” under “Edit Page” for my home page. That’s when I still get the “Comments (0)” showing up. It’s not a big deal but if it went away, that would be better. Thank you for your generosity and also your help.
So you have allow comments unchecked for that page and it still shows up? That is really odd. So odd I kinda want to see it for myself! Go over it again and if it’s still a problem, get in touch with me via email and, if you would, give me an admin account for your site and I will look around.
just learned this was because trackbacks and pingbacks were enabled – will add a note above.
YIKES. I wanted to delete the comment option sooo i went into Edit Themes then Comments on the side panel, opened up the html and deleted what I thought was the entire comments code. Unfortunately it now seems that i have gained this little blurb at the bottom of every page i have created….
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<' in /home/content/20/6358720/html/wp-content/themes/wpfolio/comments.php on line 11
do you have any idea how i can correct this? /:
start going through these steps: http://wpfolio.visitsteve.com/wiki/about/support-for-wpfolio. You don’t need to delete code to take out comments. You can disable them from within the interface. That is outlined on this page.
Thanks for the deleting trackbacks tip – it’s on each individual page guys, I’ve been deleting, rewriting code…
Just disable comments and trackbacks/pingbacks.
Cheers Steve
I fixed it!!! It was so simple. I wasn’t able to find the check box for comments on my pages to edit (turn off or on), and had the “0 Comments” text on the bottom of all of my pages even though I had disabled comments in my settings. There is an area at the top of the screen with a “screen options” link when you are editing your pages. Enable the comments field and you will be able to check comments on or off. Here is the wordpress link I found the answers to:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/enable-disable-comments/
Yea!
Thanks so much Dominique
this finally fixed it for me
George
Hi guys, i’m using 1.63 (My child theme didn’t work with 1.63 so I had to directly edit and have not got the coding experience to upgrade to 1.75 right now) and have my posts going to a ‘Blog’ page.
I can get comments to work on every other page of mine except the Blog page. I’ve spent about a day on the wordpress forums, tried all sorts of things bar a fresh install. Is there a known problem here?
Thanks
No known problem. What’s your site URL?
Is it okay if I email it to you? So this thread doesn’t show up for the URL search results!
Thanks
links in comments on this site don’t show up in search results.
Thanks Dominque for the tip, i’ve now found out what the problem was. Screen options up the top of the ‘posts’ page revealed that comments were not enabled when I switched them on. So while it was enabled for the blog page, the individual post required them as well. Screen options is an important little tab!
Hi, I am using the WPfolio child theme and am a beginner (where coding is concerned). I do understand a bit of CSS but not familiar at all with PHP.
Anyway, I followed all the instructions regarding disabling comments. Unchecked all the boxes in the settings>discussion section including the trackbacks and pingbacks. Also clicked on the ‘screen options’ on the edit post/page and unchecked the comments option there as well. Unfortunately, it still shows me the unsightly comment box. I don’t want it on any of my pages as I am attempting to give it a proper website appearance than a blog look. Please tell me what I’m doing wrong. I’m at my wit’s end!
Thank you in advance!
Turning off comments in Settings > Discussion disables comments by default from that moment forward. So to turn off comments in the posts and pages you made earlier, you need to do it within Edit > Post (or Page) in the WP admin. If you’re unsure from here, search around and use the WordPress forums. The issue you’re having is unrelated to the WPFolio Theme.
Oh, Thank you!
Hi Steve– WPfolio is *terrific* work… no other theme comes close!
Having said that, I transformed it beyond recognition for my site. But even if I revert to a 100% out of the box WPfolio theme install I’m still having trouble as outlined here (yes, I’ve googled this for hours! This is a link to a thread where I posted on WP.com but never got a response):
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wpfolio-comment-on-single-image?replies=3
“…each of my attachment pages has a link to click that says “Comments (0)”, but if I click that to leave a comment, nothing happens except “#respond” is appended to the URL.”
To clarify, from my “paintings” page, if I click an image in the gallery I go to that image’s attachment page. But no matter what I do I can’t leave a comment on the image… this is very important for me to figure out… no one can comment on one of my paintings, not even me! Cheers
Congratulations, you actually found a mistake in the code! I made the fix, but it wont go out until we push the next official release. In the meantime, the change is in the attachment.php file. You can get the latest version of the file on github here. Just replace what you have with this and it will get rid of the links.
Note to those interested in Steve’s response to my comment: his solution actually fixes the “get rid of Comments(0) issue”— his fix for my issue is simply to add this:
< ?php comments_template(); ?>…into the appropriate place of your attachments.php file.
Thanks so much Steve… my site is now fixed!