How to turn on comments for Wordpress posts

Jul 01, 2020 · 1 min read

First enable commenting under Settings > Discussion in your Wordpress admin.

Check the “Allow people to post comments on new articles’ and Click on ‘Save Changes’.

Next step is to turn on comments for each individual post that was already published on your site before you turned on comments. I recommend to do this via the “Quick edit” feature under Posts > All posts. Click quick edit and then click “allow comments” before you click Save.

If you have a lot of posts that don’t have comments enabled yet you can use the Bulk edit. If needed you can even change the amount of posts shown under Posts > All posts in one screen by clicking Screen Options on the top of the screen and changing the number of posts per screen to something larger, like 150. Then use the checkbox to select all posts and use the Bulk Actions drop down to edit all of them at once.

Troubleshooting

If your visitors report the error “blocked as suspected bot” this usually is caused by either Askimet or Mojo Marketplace plugin causing the issue. Mojo Marketplace can be named the “Bluehost” plugin if you are hosting with them.

I suggest to deactivate these plugins and use the free WPBruiser plugin instead for blocking comment spam. It will do some “magic” that stops spambots from posting without bothering your users.

If you are using Jetpack and you have Jetpack Discussions activated it might be somewhere in those settings as in that case your comment system is completely taken over by Jetpack.