Enable/Disable Comments

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.

  1. Navigate to the settings section on the WordPress Dashboard and click on the tab for Discussion
  2. The first section is titled Default Article settings.
  3. Un-check “Allow people to post comments on the article” Thats it.
  4. You can still enable comments on specific posts – like in your blog section.

Enabling/Disabling comments post by post

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.

Related Videos

Moderating your recent comments from the dashboard

15 Comments

  1. Posted July 27, 2010 at 11:37 pm | Permalink

    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!

    • Posted July 28, 2010 at 5:26 am | Permalink

      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…

      • Posted July 29, 2010 at 1:55 am | Permalink

        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.

        • Posted July 29, 2010 at 3:00 am | Permalink

          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.

          • Posted July 29, 2010 at 3:30 pm | Permalink

            just learned this was because trackbacks and pingbacks were enabled – will add a note above.

  2. jodi
    Posted September 10, 2010 at 9:59 pm | Permalink

    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? /:

  3. James
    Posted February 4, 2011 at 7:26 am | Permalink

    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

  4. dominique
    Posted April 9, 2011 at 9:13 pm | Permalink

    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!

  5. James
    Posted August 28, 2011 at 4:31 am | Permalink

    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

    • Posted September 4, 2011 at 12:54 pm | Permalink

      No known problem. What’s your site URL?

  6. James
    Posted September 5, 2011 at 7:40 am | Permalink

    Is it okay if I email it to you? So this thread doesn’t show up for the URL search results!

    Thanks

    • Posted September 5, 2011 at 8:51 am | Permalink

      links in comments on this site don’t show up in search results.

  7. James
    Posted September 6, 2011 at 5:15 am | Permalink

    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!

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