A while back Peng and I agreed that we want to disable comments and linkbacks on our older posts to try to limit how much comment spam we have to deal with on a daily basis. Unfortunately we’ve disabled the permissions on a post-by-post basis as we’ve seen spam comments on them. Ugh.
Today I was poking around and found a pretty decent solution. If you have a blog on WordPress.com (it may also work with the WordPress software but I can’t say for sure since I don’t use it) go into your edit posts screen and get a group of posts you want to disable comments and linkbacks on. I used the date filtering to show the posts for a specific month. Then click the select all box in the header row to select all posts on the page, select Edit from the Bulk Actions menu and click Apply.
Now all you have to do is to use the dropdown lists to change the permissions on Comments and/or Pings to Do not allow.
Now click on Update Posts and you’re done with that group of posts. The only two ways it could be easier is if you could filter for multiple months at a time and be able to edit more than 15 posts at a time. There may be a setting to change for the latter but I haven’t found it. As it is now it’s pretty time-consuming if you have as many posts as Peng and I have written over the last couple of years but it’s a lot better than having to make the changes one post at a time.
I’ve gone though the old posts and disabled comments on everything before May of this year. I’ve allowed comments to continue on posts that are still getting comments, but if you’re unable to comment on an old post please let Peng or I know and we’ll get comments re-enabled for that post.
Updated 12 March2010: We’ve turned off comments on this post because it’s turned into such a spam magnet. We apologize if you have a valid comment to make on this post, but even with limited comments allowed on our older posts it’s still taking quite a bit of time each day just to go through the comment spam to see if valid comments got a false positive from our spam catcher. -Peng
24 December 2009 at 9:55 pm
Great find, sis! I wonder how I missed seeing that. We should get you on the Ubuntu Network (or something) so more people will see this post.
18 January 2010 at 5:28 pm
[...] to bulk-edit comment settings on WordPress. [...]
9 March 2010 at 5:20 pm
Regarding “be able to edit more than 15 posts at a time”, on my screen, in the upper right corner, just above Search Posts, is a tab that reads “Screen Options”.
One of the “Screen Options” is “Posts per page”. That box maxxes at 999.
Hope that helps,
Atg
10 March 2010 at 8:43 am
Thanks for the info, Aaron. I forget about those options since I keep them closed to save screen real estate.
(Silly Peng posted a comment thinking it was his post. I deleted it (with his approval and made pretty much the same comment. I guess this means I should post more myself, right?)
11 March 2010 at 8:22 am
Woops! My bad. Sorry, sis.