Storytime, friends. My blog runs on WordPress. Back in 2018, I turned off commenting on my journal, because the only comments I was getting were spam. So I disabled comments and have just been journaling sans comments from other people since.

To Have Comments or Not to Have Comments

It’s fine to disable comments. WordPress blogs are notoriously known for attracting bot comments. And that’s annoying. But I started wondering: by turning off commenting am I cutting off an important, interactive part of the blog-reading experience? I am not sure what you all want, and in general, I’m not sure if people still comment on blogs anymore. What do you think? Maybe the days of commenting freely on people’s blogs are behind us.

Decision: To Have Comments

I decided that my readers deserve an interactive experience here on Fae’s Journal and I would turn commenting back on site-wide. Convinced that once I opened up commenting it’d be like the floodgates had opened and the comments would start pouring in, I opened them up.

Well, I tried to.

How Do You Enable Comments on a WordPress Blog?

1. In your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Discussions.

2. Select ‘Allow people to submit comments on new posts’

3. Set additional settings. The other comment settings area is where you can implement settings to try and avoid spam comments.

• Most importantly, you can set it so that commenters need to fill out their name and email, that users need to be registered and logged in to comment and to automatically close comments on posts as they get older.

I strongly encourage you to implement these settings or you will get a ton of bot comments. Spam comments are why I closed commenting before.

Next, you can further moderate comments by choosing the option to manually approve all comments. I encourage this setting too. You can be super strict and say that an author must have a previously approved comment to be approved.

If you’re opening up comments for the first time you probably don’t want to select that as no one will be able to comment ever.

You can also set comment moderation to hold comments in a queue if they contain links, which a large number of spam comments contain links and might be a good idea to select. I think I have it set so all comments will be in the queue because I have it set to zero. I think that means that all comments will be queued for moderation.

How Do I Disable WordPress Comments, Then?

It’s easy, thankfully! Navigate to the Discussions setting and make sure the box that says ‘Allow people to submit comments on new posts’ is unchecked. Et voilà, no more comments!

Embarrassing Dilemma

Decision made, I turned comments on.

And then, I couldn’t see them.

Going to the page resulted in the same view, no comment box, and no option to post a comment. I could not figure it out! Days passed. I was still trying to turn commenting back on with no success, poking through the settings on my site and trying to edit old posts to open conversations. I’d do everything listed above and well…

The Comments Were NOT THERE

No Comments WHY?

But I couldn’t see the comments. I was getting upset. Why couldn’t I figure it out?!

Enabling Comments Solution! A Bit Embarrassing…

Well, I finally figured it out, and actually the solution was embarrassing. But, I am humble enough to post about it, so not that embarrassing. I figured I’d share it here because you know, if I was troubled over this maybe someone else might be too, one day.

Shut UP

Um, my problem was that I use the Browser Extension called Shut Up for Chrome, and it was literally doing what it is supposed to do: making the comment boxes and any comments invisible.

Embarrassing, yes, but ultimately not a big deal. It just goes to show that sometimes you think you know what you’re doing and then something simple humbles the crap out of you.

Oh, uh, comments are on my friends.

The post WordPress Comments: Disable or Enable appeared first on Fae’s Journal.

How uncool, right? They offer a free plugin. Free, yay! But you cannot see the entry if someone actually submits something on a form that you create. Boo! Essentially, it’s a way for people to be bottlenecked into upgrading. That seems like a sketchy, unethical way to operate to me. But okay, WPForms, you do you.

After I discovered this issue, I sort of ignored it. I figured, well… I am not getting much traffic on my site despite doing a considerable amount of work on it and no one is contacting me, so it was a non-issue. Until today, when I noticed that there were two form entries that I could not see.

Mission: Impossible

My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to figure out how to view these mystery entries that were submitted on my Contact Page without paying for an upgrade, because I am broke and there are no two ways to explain that.

The whole reason I am blogging is to get some traffic so I can perhaps make some commissions through Amazon or through one of my sparse CJ ads, and I certainly cannot afford to pay for a plugin right now when I’m getting like ten hits a day for all the effort I’m putting into the site.

I digress

Anyway, I needed to figure out how to view these dang entries. I knew there was a way to view them that WPForms didn’t want me to know. I poked around in phpmyadmin in the WordPress database to view the actual database entry. That is one way to do it and it works ok I guess. But it was a lot of effort and you have to know what you’re looking for in a lot of database tables.

There is a Way to See WPForm Entries in the WordPress Dashboard! Without Upgrading!

But then I found a YouTube video tutorial by KC Tan outlining a workaround for how to view WPForm Lite Entries without having to upgrade. He gets the award today, he’s the true hero in this Mission Impossible situation! His solution works perfectly and I want to share it because if you’re anything like me you think it’s not totally on the up and up the way WP Forms is doing things, essentially holding entries hostage to get you to upgrade.

Email Logs, my Friends

KC Tan’s solution is genius in its simplicity. Here’s what you’re going to do: You are going to install another Free plug-in called Email Logs by going to the Add Plugin page in your WordPress Dashboard.

Search for “email log” and choose a plugin. The one KC Tan used is called Email Log and it’s the one I installed.

Using this plugin, all emails from WordPress are logged and displayed in the Dashboard. This plugin has a lot of different uses. But most importantly it will show you when a database entry is created with WPForms. The system submits a log when that happens.

And that’s how you’ll get an email with the content of the entry created when someone submits something with a WPForms form. As I said, this solution is smart and simple and really what I was looking for when it came to being able to see these dang contact form entries.

Contact Me?

So hey, someone contact me using my Contact Page so I can revel in my victory over the unethical practices WPForms are engaged in!

Thank you to KC Tan for this very gratifying feeling I’m experiencing right now.

The post How Can I See Entries Using WPForms Lite Version? appeared first on Fae’s Journal.