Enable and Disable Comments in WordPress

Today we are going to explore the native WordPress comments. We will see the choices we have and how to enable and disable comments correctly. If you have a website, you know how important the comments for any blog are, and if you’re new in this blogging world, do not despair, you will surely soon begin to get hundreds of comments 🙂

How to Enable/ Disable Comments in WordPress

WordPress has a very powerful native comment system where you can respond and include certain HTML tags (links, bold and even lists if the WordPress theme you are using allows it.) It is good to know which states of comments are allowed and which fits with our goal:

• Open Comments: users can leave comments in our articles by default, but we can also filter which users can participate in the conversation (for example, only users registered in our WordPress.)

• Closed Comments: There was a time where the comments were open, but for some reason now are closed. You can still read them, but more answers are not allowed (useful for a competition post, for example.)

• Off Comments: Comments are disabled from the beginning of the article’s publication. Nobody can comment or reply. Useful to make an announcement or press release (personally I do not like this option, but I understand it can be useful in some cases)

Well, by default WordPress comments configuration is enabled, but it can happen that after installing a template or deactivating a check, comments are closed, either for the whole web or for a particular article or post.

Let’s see how to activate the comments to the entire website with this article in our series of tutorials.

Enabling / Disabling comments for the entire web

Comments are organized from the Settings> Discussion Settings, near the permalinks that you should have already configured! Once inside, there are a number of options that we can mark or unmark.

The main one is “allow people to post comments on new articles,” which indicates whether all pages and posts are enabled or disabled comments. With this we can control our entire site with a single click. Fantastic.

However, in this screen there are other options that can change the behaviour of comments: “users must be registered and logged in to comment.” If this option is checked, the comments will be showed as disabled for unregistered users. Therefore, if you want comments activate for everyone, keep this option always unchecked.

Another interesting option that has been a headache for more than one is “automatically close comments on articles older than x days (14 days by default.) If we have clicked on this option, 14 days after publishing our article comments will be closed automatically. It may be interesting if our posts are about present subjects and we do not want in the future anyone else joining the conversation. But if you always want your comments “on fire”, that option will remain disabled.

Enabling / Disabling comments on each article, post or page

Well, we have all our WordPress prepared to let us millions of comments (do not worry if the first months no one comment, it is normal, you will see how little by little your readers are going to be encouraged!) But what if we want to disable comments for a particular post?

Well, for this, WordPress gives us the option to disable comments in detail on each article, post or page. To do this you must navigate to the article you want to edit in your administration panel: Posts> All posts and select the article to edit.

Once inside, you must click on the “Screen Options” tab on the top right of the screen. Then, you will see a panel with several interesting options. You are looking for “Discussion.” Make sure it is checked in blue.

This does not enable or disable the comments. This simply allows us to see and hide a box-shaped section that you can see if you scroll on this page, where it is the option “Allow comments” and “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page”. Here is where we can really enable and disable comments for each article 🙂

Comments: the best way to enrich the contents

Personally I think the comments are a key element in this blog: they adds value to the content with opinions, recommendations, other points of view, etc. any doubt that could not be resolved in the post can be answered in a comment, growing quality content and being very useful for other readers.

Last year the comments at SiloCreativo were awesome; they were really useful and helped us knowing that there is someone behind the screen that shares the content. So thank you once again for your comments! And now you know it too, enable your comments 🙂