How do I really disable comments?

by

I’ve been on a wordpress hiatus for the past 8 months and have never had to deal with building a website for an actual client. Though, no matter what I tried/how I tried to disable comments, I would always get spammers commenting. What can I do to make sure that comments are really disabled… and what can I do if I want to enable them, but spam gets too much. In essence… what is the industry standard to deal with this?

2 Answers
2

There is no need for a plugin. The reason people get this confused is because posts can have comments enabled or disabled on an individual basis. There is no “global” option, because it’s per post.

So really, it just takes two main steps to disable comments in WordPress:

  1. Settings > Discussion. Turn off both “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” and “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. This will turn off comments and pings, by default, for all NEW posts. You can still turn them on when you make a new post, if you like, but they will default to off.

  2. Go to every existing post (if any exist already) and turn off the “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings” options on them.

For this second part, you can do this in bulk in the main Posts screen.

First, simply click the checkbox in the upper left hand corner of the post list, to select all the posts on the screen. Use the Screen Options dropdown in the upper right if you want to see more posts on the screen.

Second, change the “Bulk Actions” dropdown to “Edit” and click the “Apply” button.

Third, in the new bulk editor area that appears, set “Comments” and “Pings” to “Do Not Allow” and click the red “Update” button to set those settings for all the selected posts.

Leave a Comment