There are a number of things that concern me in regard to WordPress comments. They are one of those features that I have a love hate relationship with.
Comments are great for active, well moderated communities. I genuinely enjoy receiving comments from Post Status readers, where people often add value to the conversation.
For many websites, comments can be a sad and inactive wasteland or a trollfest. For most business and corporate websites I’ve worked on, comments are not wanted at all.
There seems to be a sweet spot of niche and medium-sized websites where comments tend to be most valuable.
But WordPress is fairly aggressively pro-comments by default.
Considering these things, I think we should take a look at default WordPress comment behavior and talk about how we may be able to improve the overall experience.
Comments should be off on pages by default
What percentage of WordPress pages do people really want comments on? I can think of very few scenarios where that’s the desired behavior.
I think they are almost universally a posts-only feature, especially in the era of WordPress-the-CMS.
I believe comments on pages should be off by default with WordPress. I think they should be off for registered custom post types by default as well.
I realize removing support for comments on pages and CPTs is probably out of the question, but we could at least make them un-checked or toggled off. If you want to do so yourself, you can use this simple but excellent filter for turning off comments for pages in your theme or functionality plugin:
[gist id=”02df9fc6fe5bd758d21c”]
Note that this also turns off pings, which I also always do for pages.
