Comments comments

General Discussion
1

Hi,
I have recently uploaded my blog using Classicpress. I imported my posts from earlier wp installations. All went well. Thanks.
Throughout the blog, I disable comments for the posts. Only on a page “Contact” I have enabled the comments. In the discussion settings I have chosen every comment to be moderated.
My question is, can I use this “contact” page using the comment feature and without using any contact form ? I don’t wish to use the contact form plugin, so will this arrangement work ?
Thanks.

2

It’s working very out of the box but it can work, keep in mind that you will have the comments ON THE PAGE so when people comment and you approve the comment everybody is going to see that. Moreover you will need to understand how it enfolds privacy-wise because when messaging you the people could write things that are personal data.

Me being me, can I ask why you do not want a contact form?

I can recommend a plugin for forms specifically that is HTML Forms by ibericode, it allows you to code the form in HTML (whatever html you want) and customize it with the custom css feature in the customizer and it takes care of validation and saving the form content to the database when it’s submitted. then you just go to entries in the dash and read them.

3

Thanks for your prompt response.

when people comment and you approve the comment everybody is going to see that.

I don’t plan to approve any “comment” on this page. So this message will never be shown publicly, however I could see it in the dashboard>comments section.

I prefer comments disabled on all posts, because controlling the comments is quite time consuming.

Now about the plugins…I use plugins like wp import and deactivate them immediately after their use. I find a CMS more stable without a plugin.
However, I will surely try the form plugin which you recommended.
Thanks again.
–freebird

1 Like
4

Yes, if this is what you want and you don’t plan to approve them. This will work. Just keep in mind spam. Comment forms get a lot of spam, so make sure you have an anti-spam plugin to reduce the number of spam comments you will receive.

1 Like
5

Thanks for your suggestion. I have two doubts however.

  1. Will a contact-form plugin suffer from spam?
  2. I guess comments’ form is not a plugin and is part of the cp core. If so, why not include the anti-spam plugin in the core?
6

Comment forms can be susceptible to spam, depending on how they were written.

Including anti-spam in core would be something else for core devs to maintain and would require plugin devs to use the core functions where many prefer to take their own approach.

7

Whatever form you use, it needs to be protected from spam. It’s not a CP issue; it’s just a general HTML form issue, as they get spammed by bots.

I did try petitioning to add a simple anti-spam feature to comments, which would reduce a lot of automated spam. But it did not receive support.