Let’s say a blogger will be going away for a few days and won’t have internet connection to check on the comments posted by visitors. It’s better to temporarily disable the comments to prevent spammers from flooding the comment box with all sorts of useless links. Here’s how to temporarily disable the comment form on all posts.

It requires 2 steps. Modifying the theme code and install a plugin that would stop anyone from using the wordpress comment php script.

1.) Turn off the display of the comment form in your Comments file in your template. To do this, go to “Presentation” -> “Theme Editor” then edit the Comments file. Find the part in the file that looks like this (it is probably slightly different, depending on what theme you’re using):

[code]comment_status) : ?>

Leave a Reply

[/code]

Change it to this:

[code]comment_status) : ?>

Comments are temporarily disabled

Leave a Reply

[/code]

2.) Either rename your wp-comments-post.php file (in the root of your WordPress directory) to something unguessable like betyoucantguessthis.php OR install this plugin that can temporarily disable all comments but choose to still allow trackbacks and / or pingbacks.

The second step is necessary because spammers don’t need to visit your comment form to be able to post comments.

I did this research because I will be going away for a week to Taiwan and Hong Kong. So there won’t be any articles and comments would be turned off.

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