When "Automatically close comments on articles older than X days" is enabled, comments appear closed on draft posts

[evarlese]

If the setting to "Automatically close comments on articles older than X days" is enabled via Settings -> Discussion, comments automatically appear as closed on draft posts until the post is published. This is regardless of the Discussion settings configured on the Post Edit page for the draft post.

To replicate:

1. Via Settings -> Discussion, click on "Automatically close comments on articles older than X days."

2. Create a new post and save it as a draft. Make sure comments are enabled in your Discussion module.

3. When previewing the draft post, it will say "Comments closed" regardless of the Discussion settings.

The post will show comments as being allowed once it's published, they only show up as closed when in the draft format.

[solarissmoke]

Only close comments on published posts

[solarissmoke]

This is being caused by _close_comments_for_old_posts(), which uses post_date_gmt to work out when the post was published. But for drafts this is always set to 0, so the post always appears to be older than the max age threshold.

I'm thinking that the filter should only apply to published posts... see patch.

[solarissmoke]

... although you can't comment on drafts anyway, so maybe we should never be displaying a comment form on draft previews?

[MikeHansenMe]

This does not seem like it would be a problem to me since no one can comment on a draft anyway. I guess if you leave a draft for months before you publish it, it could cause problems but I would hope you would update the post date in this case.

[rachelbaker]

This looks to work as intended to me.

[rachelbaker]

Tested the patch from @MikeHansenMe and it works as intended. With the "close comments after X days" option enabled comments are no longer closed on unpublished posts. I added 20262.3.diff which just uses a stricter check on the publish conditional.

[nacin]

I think this needs to be a bit more encompassing. Right now, core closes comments on drafts, published posts, etc., but also privately published posts. Changing this to just 'publish' would harm some of that.

I think we should just hardcode this to skip 0 values.

I would have it skip 'draft', 'pending', and 'auto-draft' — like what currently happens for 0000-00-00 values in wp_insert_post() — but I think hardcoding it actually makes sense here. If it's a "draft" backdated 31 days, then it probably *should* show up as comments closed.

[nacin]

Hmm. Given that the form won't work, I'm not actually sure it should be shown in this case.

This should e A) wontfix, B) 20262.4.diff​, or C) a major change to how this is themed. I don't think 'C' interests me.

Wontfix?

[nacin]

I do tend to think that there's a UX issue saying comments are closed when they are not, but I'm not sure I like any of the alternatives.

What's the best UX here? Show the form and disable the fields?

[rachelbaker]

Based on @Nacin's comments above, moving this out of the 4.3 milestone and added the UX feedback keyword.

[MikeHansenMe]

I think we should go with option B. It seems to be pretty common that people draft content for long periods of time. @nacin's patch still applies.

[wonderboymusic]

more opinions on B, please

[SergeyBiryukov]

20262.4.diff​ makes sense to me.

[rachelbaker]

In 20262.5.diff​ I refreshed @nacin's patch against trunk and added a few unit tests for _close_comments_for_old_post().

[rachelbaker]

Correcting unit test factory methods from 20262.5.diff to get the id

[rachelbaker]

In 20262.6.diff​ I corrected uses of self::factory()->post->create_and_get() where I was expecting to return the post_id to the correct factory method self::factory()->post->create() thanks to feedback from @wonderboymusic.

[wonderboymusic]

In 35475:

Comments: don't auto-close comments on draft posts.

Adds unit tests.

Props solarissmoke, MikeHansenMe, nacin, rachelbaker.
Fixes #20262.