Disabling Comments on Pages with WordPress

So I’ve been struggling with tons of comment spam on my blog, and it’s always to old pages I want around but haven’t updated in forever. I get so many that I figured out just now I’ve been losing real comments within the spam and purging with them.

What I finally figured out is that you have to goto the pages list and click “Quick Edit” to find the option to disable comments on a page. For whatever reason the big editor for pages doesn’t have the option like it does for Posts.

Just a quick tip for you WordPress users out there. I’m sure many of you, like me, have been frustrated by this and just thought it wasn’t possible. I already tell WordPress to disable comments on posts that are 14 days or older, which reduces spam ALOT, but it doesn’t affect pages. This should help me get way less spam and find your comments easier.

12 thoughts to “Disabling Comments on Pages with WordPress”

  1. I’ve been also struggling with spam comments, even akismet have no other way to control it. My problem solved when I finally put captcha code verification on my comment form area, they stopped spamming anymore.

  2. Hey Tim,
    You can actually disable comments using the “big page editor” on WP but for some reason they have this setting hidden by default.

    And just to make things even more tricky they have also made it very difficult to find the link to change the default setting.

    However this is what you do:

    1. Go to the WP big page editor.
    2. Click on the tab marked “screen options” in the top right hand corner.
    3.Locate the check box marked “discussion” and place a check in the box (also make any other changes you might like to change the settings on this page.)
    4. You can now click “screen options” again to remove this menu
    5. Now you should notice that under the main text editing area that a new box has opened up called “Discussion” with options to allow or disallow comments and to allow or disallow trackbacks and pingbacks.

    Hope that is useful.

    And if you want an idea for another blog post then please feel free to do one explaining exactly what trackbacks and pingbacks are, the differences between then and why you might want them or not as the case may be.

    Patrick.

  3. Thanks for that. I also battle with spam with one of my sites and ended up disabling a plugin to stop comments. I see now what to do.

    I appreciate that info very much.

    Janny

  4. Hi Tim,
    Just imagine if it’s best idea. I would like recommend for you paid version of Akismet for just $5/month

    I have it instaled on one of my blog and it seems it works perfectly. All spam messages are automaticly marked as spam :) And really I’m interested to purchase paid version of Akismedt for all my blogs/sites in near future.

    Let me know if you tryed Akismet before . If yes what is your experience? It works on your side.

    Cheers, Lukasz

    1. I currently use Akismet, which does mark the comments as spam. The problem is it also marks good comments as spam, so when I go through them I’ve been losing real comments too. Disabling the comments altogether ensures that the # of incoming comments is lower so I don’t have to sort as much.

  5. Thanks Tim and Patrick, this is really helpful information, especially regarding pages. I didn’t realize I could disable comments after ten days. It’s good to learn these little tricks for WP.

    Nick

  6. Hi Tim,

    I recently set up a new blog for one of my software products, and for 8 days I received a lot of spam comments. Some of them even linked backed to their blog and took my content. So I switched to a WP plugin called Livefyre. This plugin manages the spam, requires registration at livefyre to post, and has a nice social element that allows you to monitor other post to the blog.

    I’m now using it on all my blogs.

  7. Hello Tim,

    I also have received a lot of spam comments on my blog.
    I noticed that most spam comments were comments to the same topic, and the comments came from one website, so i deleted all comments regarding this post.
    For a few days the spam was gone, but it came back. I deleted all the comments, and installed askimet. Now the spam goes directly to my spamfolder, so some good comments also get lost. I don’t know either how to solve this, because i receive to much spam. You can check the urls from the people who comment on your post and block them if you don’t trust the website.

    Marja

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