instant debate shows up even when comments are closed… disqus doesn’t

Resolved marcnyc
(@marcnyc)

13 years, 11 months ago

after testing JSKit Echo, Disqus and Instant debate I was undecided between the latter two. If you google “disqus vs instant debate” you’ll find plenty of comparison articles and what it comes down to is that they are pretty much the same.

So I had decided to use Instant Debate, simply because they are owned by the same company which owns WordPress, which to me guarantees that this plug in will always work and be updated…

The only thing I don’t like about Instant Debate is that the comment form appears even on pages where no comments are allowed, while on Disqus understands that there are no comments allowed and doesn’t show up.

I was wondering if anyone has run into this issue and knows how to solve it because I’d like to stick to Instant Debate but if I can’t fix this I’ll have to use Disqus…

Thanks

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

Volunteer Moderator

13 years, 11 months ago

I found this via IntenseDebate’s FAQ. It seems to have its own comment closure system outside of WordPress’ discussion settings.

Visit the blog post in question when you are logged into IntenseDebate and select the text “Admin options” located at the top left of the comment section. Then select “Disable comments for this blog post” and save your settings.

http://intensedebate.com/faq#li511

Thread Starter marcnyc
(@marcnyc)

13 years, 11 months ago

Thanks so much macmanx!
I actually don’t see that in their FAQ but i’ve followed your directions and it helps a little bit but not much… Unfortunately Intense Debate adds a very invasive “comment disabled” section at the end of the pages for which you have disabled comments, instead I’d like a clean page.

I use the amazing Suffusion wordpress theme and Suffusion has a feature to even remove the words “comments are closes” from the end of the posts where commenting has been disabled within wordpress, so the pages look clean.

Disqus actually works just like the WordPress comments so when you close them for one post they don’t show up at all… But Intense Debate wants to be there at all cost and be seen even when the comments are closed and that’s really annoying!

I really wanted to use Intense Debate but I might have to use DiscqUs because of that.

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

Volunteer Moderator

13 years, 11 months ago

It makes sense that there would be a way to stop that from displaying. You may want to contact their support department:

http://intensedebate.com/contactus

Thread Starter marcnyc
(@marcnyc)

13 years, 11 months ago

unfortunately their support department sucks or is hibernating… They have an official email form, twitter account, facebook account and an un-official getsatisfaction group… I’ve posted in all of those mediums and got 1 answer a week or more later… I have another 3 or 4 unanswered questions

Beau Lebens
(@beaulebens)

13 years, 11 months ago

Hi @marcnyc; currently, the best (only) way to completely remove ID from pages/posts where comments are not allowed (and if there are no comments already) is to modify your template/theme files to actually never call comments_template() if comments are disabled. We’re making some changes so that you won’t have to do this, but they won’t be released for a little while yet.

Marc Heatley
(@barkerbaggies)

13 years, 9 months ago

Hi – any movement on removing the “comments closed” content?
WP Libra
(@wpbum)

13 years, 9 months ago
I just did this for one of my sites.

Basically add this code in single.php or page.php or whatever you are trying to remove the comments from.

Find where it calls your comment template and replace with
```
<?
if ( comments_open() )
{
?>
<div id="comment">
<?php comments_template(); ?>
</div>
<?
} ?>
```
If you use div tags for CSS styling like I do make sure you include it all.

Basically what it does is checks to see if you have enabled comments on that post or page in wp-admin. If it is enabled then it will call the template for comments.

If it is disabled then it will never call that template and you wont see anything.

Problem solved. 🙂
Jer
(@gemllc)

13 years, 7 months ago

wpbum!!!

Man, I could kiss you right now. I just wasted several hours mucking about with the CSS conditional statement, but was seeing unreliable results. I also hated how the comment box would appear and disappear with the loading of the CSS, depending on where the statement was placed.

The bottom line is that your code completely side-steps the aggravation and works very well with the WP default template theme (which I have now hacked to all hell much to my pleasure). You made these last two hours of insanity well worth the trouble. I wish I knew PHP a little better to code such elegant solutions. But until that day comes, I am grateful to gurus such as yourself.

THANK YOU!

Mike Clark
(@mpclark)

13 years, 3 months ago

There’s a downside to wpbum’s method, though, if you’re in the habit of leaving comments open for a certain period and then turning them off (I turn off commenting when a post gets to 28 days old, for instance)

You’ll find that once you’ve closed the comments on a post, any comments left prior to that will also stop showing up, which is generally not a good thing.