Tag: wordpress comments

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I noticed when reviewing my server logs that the comments feeds for individual posts were receiving hits. This is undesirable since the only “comments” we have are pingbacks and webmentions. I wanted to remove the comments feeds from the head. I found a solution in a 2018 Stack Overflow post combined with an addendum from another user. I added the following code to the child theme functions.php both here and on The New Leaf Journal:

add_filter('feed_links_show_comments_feed', function() {
return false;
});

[Solution Source: Users leoauri and Ivan Shatsky on Stack Overflow]

(PS: I am not a WordPress developer. Please do your own research and double check your work before messing with your functions.php, but it seems to be working here. If someone has a better solution, do tell.)

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I had been planning to use the Gwolle Guestbook plugin here (I cannot use it on The New Leaf Journal because it relies on JQuery, which I disable over there). However, I decided that it was too heavy for what will probably be a light use-case. Over on The New Leaf Journal, I had briefly tried a comments-based Guestbook with an open source spam blocklist. However, we did not get any legitimate entries in that Guestbook before I shuttered it on account of the fact that a small number of spam comments were  somehow showing up as published despite my requiring moderation in the WordPress settings. Wanting a Guestbook, I decided to give it a try on both sides while adding Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to my set-up. I also added a Block List Updater from the same developer to keep the open source-sourced blocklist up to date without my manual intervention. Finally, I use a plugin called Plugin Load Filter with allows me to explicitly limit Antispam Bee to specific pages. For example, this means that Antispam Bee only functions on the Guestbook page of The New Leaf Journal at the moment. We will see how it goes. But the way, while this site’s Guestbook looks solid (if I do so humbly submit myself), take a look at what I did on The New Leaf Journal side of things.