Lollipop Local

I always thought that allowing comments would make for better engagement on a site. However, the ways that people are able to scam and spam your website through comments have become legion, resulting in numerous wasted hours going through the spam to filter out the good comments and delete the spam.

I had set up the premium CommentLuv plugin to encourage this activity but it is just being abused. I can see through my stats that people are now actually searching for blogs which allow the CommentLuv sharing facilities, purely so they can leave inane and generic nonsense. But, worse still, they leave comments that bear no relation to the post itself and then are rude enough to actually include an anchor text link in the body of that comment – again on a completely irrelevant subject.

I am coming to the conclusion that it might actually be easier to just disable comments altogether.

How to disable comments from new WordPress blogposts and pages

To disable comments from most blog posts or pages, you select Screen Options from the top right of your dashboard screen on that page or post and then check the box for comments at the top, before disabling it in the box that will appear under the body of the post or page.

You may find that it is also worth disabling trackbacks and pingbacks as there are numerous scamming opportunities relating to this now as well.

Disabling comments from existing WordPress Pages and Blogposts

To disable comments from future posts, you uncheck the boxes as described above. And then you go to the Posts list, select them all. Next check Edit under bulk actions and hit apply.

You will see a Comments box appear with No Change in it. Choose “do not allow” and then hit update posts.

This should work.

Having said that, I would not advocate no way for your reader to communicate with you at all. The whole idea of having a blog is to encourage engagement. So substitute the comments box with a Facebook comments box – people have to use their Facebook personal profile to comment and there is no backlink opportunity. It makes scamming it a much less attractive proposition.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 10:22 am and is filed under Web Design, Webmistress Hosting, Wordpress Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.