HI, Can anyone guide me how i can totally disable comments in my blog , Spam is headache for me ! Thanks Usman
On each post or on a global level you can enable/disable comments. Log into the admin panel > Settings > Discussion
Yes, give Akismet a go. It's like a silver bullet tipped with garlic kryptonite! I also suggest you read the Wordpress Guide To Combating Comment Spam But if you really want to disable all comments, uncheck where it says "Allow people to post comments on the article."
If you want to keep comments on, but stop the spam - a few weeks ago I saw a ReCaptcha modification on a wordpress blog. Besides Akismet, maybe you should look into adding ReCaptcha for your comments. The blog I say the modification on, the owner was getting around 500 spam comments a week. When the modification was installed, the spam stopped.
Akismet works really good to stop SPAM comments IMO so OP needs to go for it first. BTW can you give me url for this ReCaptcha thingy ? Do you think it really helps (Are you using) ?? DON.
Here is some information on the ReCaptcha page - http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/ This is where the plug-in can be downloaded from wordpress.org - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ The guy where I saw the recaptcha modification - we are on several forums together. For a few weeks he was posting in the forums that he was getting around 500 or more comments a week. I think the number might even have been as high as 600 spam comments. After he installed the modification, I has not seen him complaining about spam. When I visit his blog, I do not see any spam comments either. So I'am guessing it works pretty good. Because the comments are not moderated. Maybe the OP can use the Akismet and ReCaptcha modification together. As for comments on my blog - comments are disabled. If visitors wish to comment on an article, they are referred to my forum. If I want feed back, I'll post a short article in the forum and a link to the forum post is at the bottom of the blog post. If there is no link to the forum in the blog post, that means I dont want feed back or comments. From the forum, I let the security of VBulletin deal with spammers.
That is not a responsible thing to say. Boo hoo on you! You should never tell a person to delete files from their theme to solve a problem that has on/off solution afforded them in the Admin panel. Maybe a silver-plated bullet coated in arsenic. It is a fairly lethal solution however and I would recommend the OP follow your advice.
Stopping all comments on your entire blog sounds more like a social suicide... and definitely does not sound like a good idea. You can do it from the Admin panel as others mentioned, but using a captcha will definitely STOP the spam. Akismet is also fine but does not catch all the spam messages and still catches some what are not spam; also you are not allowed to use it for free for a company blog what would not be such an issue, but imagine that you are heavy content provider and you own 30-40 blogs in your network..
You can also make that you need to approve all the comments. Go to your wp-admin>Settings>Discussion. You can see the settings that you want to configure there.
It's simple matter of turning them on or off in the Admin panel. Only thing about approving everything... what if you are getting inundated with comments do thing spam ones get filtered out this way before hand?
okay, this dogged for ages on a new site I was developing. Was SURE I remembered on an older site you could just uncheck a box. Well, no box anywhere could I find. UNTIL I realized that the "Screen Options" on any edit page, next to the Help button with all the little boxes on it wasn't to enable those features on the site, it was there to give you editing functions. Therefore, if you check the "Discussions" box, you'll get to edit that function which includes comments as well as trackbacks and pingbacks on that particular page or post. Just use the option on every page you create and you can allow or disallow at will, no matter if its a post or page, and don't have to mess around with code on templates or dealing with spam, if that's the problem. If you do allow comments, I do recommend Akismet, it gets all the spam, you just have to empty out the spam folder every once in a while.