Enabling and Disabling comments

Comments are enabled by default on posts and pages.

How you disable comments depends on whether you want the change to apply to:

1. New posts and pages you’ll publish in the future.
2. Posts and pages you’ve already published.

Disabling comments on future posts and pages

You disable comments on new posts and pages you’ll publish in the future in Settings > Discussion.

This is a simple as:

1.  Go to Settings > Discussion inside your dashboard.

2.  Deselect ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles ‘ and ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks’ under Default article settings.

3.  Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

Disabling comments on already published posts and pages

Any changes to your default article settings on Settings > Discussion only apply to any posts or pages you publish in the future.

You can disable comments on post or page you already published by using:

1. Quick Edit
2. The Discussion module
3. Bulk edit

Using Quick Edit to Disable Comments

Quick Edit opens the post options letting you configure features such as title, status, passwords, categories, tags comments and the timestamp without having to edit the full post.

You can disable comments using Quick Edit by:

1.  Going to to either Posts > All Posts or Pages > All Pages

2.  Locate the post or page you want to disable comments on

3.  Hover over it’s title to bring up it’s action menu.

4.  Click on Quick Edit, deselect ‘Allow Comments’ and then click on Update. 

Using the Discussion module to Disable Comments

To change the comment settings for a post or page you already published you can open the post or page for editing and uncheck ‘Allow Comments’ and ‘Allow Trackbacks and Pingback on this page’ in the Discussion module and then click Update.

By default, new blogs have the Discussion module hidden.  You can reveal it by clicking on Screen Options and selecting the checkbox next to Discussion.

Once the Discussion module is revealed you’ll see it appear below your Visual Editor on your Edit page.

Using Bulk Edit to Disable Comments

Bulk edit allows you to modify multiple posts or pages at the same time.

This is as simple as:

1.  Go to Posts > All Posts.

2.  Select the posts you want to edit.

3.  Then in the Bulk Actions dropdown select Edit and then click the Apply Button

4.  Now select Do not allow from the drop down menu next to Comments and then click Update.

• This hides any existing comments on those posts and stops any one from adding new comments.

Automatically Closing Comments

An alternative option to disabling comments is to automatically close comments after a certain number of days.

This is as simple as:

1.  Go to Settings > Discussion inside your dashboard.

2.  Select ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than” and choose the number of days before comments are closed.

3.  Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

Enabing Comments

If you’ve disabled comments on posts and pages, and want to enable comments, you just need to follow the same steps as disabling comments except:

1. On Settings > Discussion you select ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’
2. On already publish posts and pages you select “Allow Comments”