Ace Goulet

WordPress Discussion Settings

Most of the sites I build do not use comments, but even if you don’t include the comment form in a page/post, the comment api is open for any new posts and pages created. An easy way to get ahead of this is to disable comments from the very start of dev, so bots can’t find a backdoor and throw spam into your DB. Spam in the DB isn’t a HUGE deal, but I often have clients asking about it and it’s better to avoid it all together. Here’s a screenshot of the discussion settings I put in place when I start dev on a new WP site with no comments:

If you want to close comments/pingbacks on existing content, you’ll need to do that in the database, but it’s easy. Just run these sql commands on your posts table:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status='closed' WHERE comment_status = 'open';
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status='closed' WHERE ping_status = 'open';
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