WiscWeb - Turning On/Off Comments for Posts
This document will walk you through the process of finding and tweaking the WordPress settings involved with turning on and turning off comments for Posts. Turning on commenting will allow more engagement with your customer base but you may want to turn them off if you are getting a lot of spam comments.
In this document:
- Purpose and use
- Turn On Commenting for New Posts
- Turn On Commenting for Existing Posts
- Turn Off Commenting for New Posts
- Turn Off Commenting for Existing Posts
- Bulk Removing Comments from Existing Posts
Purpose and use
By default, a WiscWeb site has site-wide commenting turned off. This is to alleviate the potential of spam comments being submitted to your site. Turning on commenting will allow more engagement with your site audience. To further protect yourself from spam comments, consider WiscWeb - Using the Akismet plugin to filter spam from comments.
Turning On Commenting
For New Posts
By default, we turn off commenting on your site when we create your project. This is because most site owners do not want comments on their articles.
To turn on commenting for new posts, follow these steps:
- Login to your WiscWeb Dashboard for your site
- Click on Settings
- Choose Discussion
- In the section marked Default Article Settings, check the box that says "Allow people to post comments on new articles"
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the blue Save Changes button
For Existing Posts
Please note that updating the site settings will only turn on commenting for any new posts.
To turn on commenting on posts that already exist, you will need to enable this option in each post:
- Navigate to the post you'd like to update
- Click on the Screen Options tab in the top right corner of your screen
- Confirm that the Discussion and Comments checkboxes are checked so that you will be able to view this setting area for the post
- Scroll to the bottom until you see the section labeled Discussion
- Check the box that says Allow Comments
- If you would like to manage existing comments for this post, scroll down to the Comments section (just below Discussion settings). You can delete and modify the existing comments as needed.
- Scroll up and click on the blue Update button to save your changes
Turning Off Commenting
For New Posts
If the commenting option had been turned on for your site and you would like to remove this option, please follow the steps below:
- Login to your WiscWeb Dashboard for your site
- Click on Settings
- Choose Discussion
- In the section marked Default Article Settings, uncheck the box that says "Allow people to post comments on new articles"
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the blue Save Changes button
For Existing Posts
Please note that updating the site settings will only turn off commenting for any new posts.
To turn off commenting on posts that already exist, you will need to enable this option in each post:
- Navigate to the post you'd like to update
- Click on the Screen Options tab in the top right corner of your screen
- Confirm that the Discussion and Comments checkboxes are checked so that you will be able to view this setting area for the post
- Scroll to the bottom until you see the section labeled Discussion
- Check the box that says Allow Comments
- If you would like to manage existing comments for this post, scroll down to the Comments section (just below Discussion settings). You can delete and modify the existing comments as needed.
- Scroll up and click on the blue Update button to save your changes.
Bulk Removing Comments from Existing Posts
- Navigate to Posts in your Dashboard
- Check the box next to "Title" to select all posts
- In the Bulk Actions dropdown, select Edit
- Click the Apply button
- You should now see a Bulk Edit area at the top of your post list
- To the right, click the dropdown for Comments and choose Do Not Allow
- Click the blue Update button
Troubleshooting
- Don't forget to follow the steps for updating existing posts to avoid getting spam comments from older articles. You will have to make this change on every single post that is already published but the overall setting change will apply to any new posts.
- Turning off commenting will prevent spam messages on your blog articles and posts.
- You must be an Administrator on the site in order to update the site settings.