![\"Weekend](\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/pull-plug-comments.jpg\")
<\/a>Website comments have been a recent talking point with a recent article from\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a> prompting WP Tavern’s Sarah Gooding to post\u00a0a spirited defence of comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n The value of comments really depends on the type of site you have and most WordPress site owners probably\u00a0don’t own sites with the size of audience that encourages the attention-seeking trolls.<\/p>\n But trolls aren’t the only reason for wanting to control comments. You might publish a site around emotive subjects (climate change, politics, religion) where commenters seemingly can’t help themselves; or perhaps it’s just more mundane a reason such as not having the time to manage comments across an ever expanding body of posts.<\/p>\n Or in a scenario that is pertinent to WPMU DEV, closing the comments on a post written by an author who no longer contributes to the blog.<\/p>\n Whilst disabling comments when setting up a new site is as easy as ticking a checkbox in Settings<\/strong> > Discussion<\/strong>, it’s a little trickier on existing sites, especially those with plenty of content.<\/p>\n Of course, there’s always the manual options but we’ve all got better things to do with our time, so let’s look at automated solutions for the two most common scenarios:<\/p>\n The quickest method is to use the\u00a0Automatically close comments on articles older than setting in Settings<\/strong> > Discussion<\/strong>. Setting this to 1<\/em> (0 doesn’t have any effect) will close the comments on all posts older than 1 day.<\/p>\n The biggest issue with this setting is that it only applies to posts and so pages and any custom post types will still continue to show the new comment form.<\/p>\n If you have pages or custom post types then you are going to need to\u00a0add some custom code (see below).<\/p>\n\n
Disabling Comments On Existing Posts<\/h2>\n
Hear No Evil<\/h3>\n