How to easily disable WordPress pingbacks & comments for new & old posts

Today I decided to disable comments and pingbacks on my WordPress blog because the ratio of spam to real comments was in the region of 200:1, I’ve tried various anti-spam comment pluggin’s but with only limited success. So enough was enough & I’ve disabled pingbacks & comments on my WordPress blog now.

It’s easy enough to do this for new posts:
Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 11.39.09

1. Click Settings
2. Uncheck “Allow link notification from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” & “Allow people to post comment on new articles”

You will also want to go and disable this for all your old posts, here is a quick & easy way to do that:
Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 11.41.031. Go to your “Posts” page
2. Expand “Screen Options”
3. Change the options so you have a good number of posts displayed.
4. Apply the “Screen Options” change.
5. Select all posts.
6. Select “Edit” in the drop down option & click “Apply”.
7. Set “Comments” to “Do not allow” (this disables comments).
8. Set “Pings” to “Do not allow” (this disables pingbacks).
9. Click “Update” to apply changes.

Note: if you didn’t select a high enough number for option 3 you will need to repeat this process on Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 & so on.

Now you have turned off pingbacks & comments this will reduce the amount of spam that finds it’s way to your WordPress blog – that was easy wasn’t it!

 

Jason Vigus

Embed a YouTube video in WordPress posts

When I tried to embed a video on another blog post the other day I did a quick “Google” to see what was involved in the process, to my surprise, rather pleasantly I discovered all you need to do is put the URL of the video you wish to embed straight into the post editor.

For example, I would use the following code to embed the video (no quotes):

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ”

And this would be the result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ

Jason Vigus