Why it’s not as simple as you’d think to remove all past, present, and future comments.

Posted on September 24, 2016 by MichaelWDean

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WordPress is great software, but it’s curated by one-worldy Frisko liberals.
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Never has that been more apparent than tonight when, after two years of getting yelled at by entitled assholes who demand things for free, I decided to finally close comments and remove free tech support completely from FeenPhone.
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But when I tried, I found out: WordPress HAS NO NATIVE WAY to delete (or even just hide) all old comments. You can monkey around for a while in WordPress to natively disable commenting on past and future posts, but not also hide all old comments (without editing php, which can break things).
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I wanted to delete all the old comments here because there was a HUGE noise-to-signal ratio. And the few actual small tech issues that were worked out in hundreds of comments have already been added into our manuals on this site. So there’s no reason to leave the comments.
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I can hear you thinking “Well, for history. And those people worked so HARD on those comments, you OWE it to them to leave the comments!”
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Well, no. And really, the 95% of the comments here were just a screechy distraction from what is an otherwise good site with amazing no-cost software and clearly written tech docs.

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SO…one could manually remove each comment, but that could take hours, or even days, if you’ve had a very active blog.
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Easily globally removing hundreds of old comments in one action doesn’t jive with the WordPress Central Planning Committee’s five-year vision of “Everyone should have ‘free speech’….even on everyone else’s property maaaaan….”
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Fortunately there is a kick-ass free plugin to take care of this. It’s called “Disable Comments.” (I would have called it “The Curmudgeonator 3000”, but I don’t care what it’s called, it WORKS. And I’m not going to go on their site and tell them how to run their business like many freeloaders did here while eating milk and cookies in their pajamas and hugging a teddy bear at their college safe space.)
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The Disable Comments plugin disables comments on any past and future posts & pages. It also even hides every comment ALREADY on the site. All this with only three clicks. That’s perfect. Turns a blog into a website. You know, “I talk, you listen (if you want). If not, go away.”
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It’s gonna be hard not to install this plugin on my other 11 websites. It felt SO damn liberating to add it here.
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Sometimes I don’t even care what people have to say. And sometimes I do care, but I’m too busy working on the next thing to read people’s thoughts on last thing.
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–MWD