Confusion of WP admin Discussion settings

[Lorangeo]

On the "Settings>Discussion" page:

1) "Default article settings" should be replaced by "Default comment settings" (because these important settings do not only apply to posts (articles)), but also to pages!

2) "Allow people to post comments on new articles" should be replaced by:

--> "Allow people to post comments" (best option in my opinion)

or

--> "Allow people to post comments on new pages and posts"

Sorry if this is not the right place to make such suggestions.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: ticket:12991:22

[helenyhou]

Replying to Lorangeo:

"Allow people to post comments" (best option in my opinion)

This is inaccurate, because the setting will only apply to posts/pages/etc. made going forward. It does not apply the setting to items that are already published.

--> "Allow people to post comments on new pages and posts"

Also inaccurate - there can be (and are) post types beyond pages and posts. Attachments, for instance, or a custom post type.

[Lorangeo]

Ok, maybe you have another suggestion?

I personally like ​chipbennett's suggestion:

Allow people to post comments on:       [ ] Posts
                                        [ ] Pages
                                        [ ] Attachments

Allow link notifications 
(pingbacks/trackbacks) on:              [ ] Posts
                                        [ ] Pages
                                        [ ] Attachments

Attempt to notify blogs linked to from: [ ] Posts
                                        [ ] Pages

But this segmented approach might be a next step.

For the present replacing "Default article settings" by "Default comment settings" and "Allow people to post comments on new articles" by "Allow people to post comments" (or maybe "Allow people to post comments on new contents") seems a logical and necessary fix that would be easy to implement.

Sorry for my limited English.

[helenyhou]

I don't have another suggestion, no. Only evaluating what is being suggested. The checkboxes from #12991 are a good idea, although I'd probably rather see it as a general setting with the ability to expand to see the more granular controls. As far as the text itself goes, "new content" seems reasonable enough to me. It doesn't tell the user what kinds of content actually accept comments, but neither does the current version.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #22961

[t-mug]

Let's not mix wrong text labels and feature requests. For now this topic should be about correcting wrong labels. And in fact: the actual descriptions are in parts misleading.

1.) I vote for labeling the first section sth. like Default comment presettings instead of "Default article settings", as SergeyBiryukov suggested, including maybe even a change to presetting, because it's about presettings which can be changed on an individual post before publishing it. Or General preselections? But I'm not a native speaker, the meaning should be simply correct.

2.) "Allow people to post comments on new articles" is really very confusing, as I can say from my own and my customers experience :-(
Not only for new articles and pages, even for attachments and custom post types you'll define the discussion activation here. So I vote for sth. like Preselect comment activation while creating new content.

3.) All mentioned articles within the first section should be discarded and replaced by sth. which is more true.

[chriscct7]

#22961 now has a patch for that issue (related). @helenyhou did you want to re-evaluate this issue?

[joyously]

With the related ticket shipped, this is what I see in 4.7.4

[joyously]

This could clear things up a little.

[joyously]

What if the explanation was moved to be near what it is explaining?
I propose changing "Default article settings" to "Article default settings" or "Article defaults". With the explanation right below it, it becomes more obvious that these settings are only defaults and each article can have a different value.

[melchoyce]

The design team chatted about this in today's ticket triage.

We agree with @joyously that moving the "These settings may be overridden..." caveat to underneath the label makes sense.

We'd also recommend updating the text to read:

Allow people to post comments on new content (like posts, pages, and some custom post types)

@helen, what do you think? Are we good to move forward?

[afercia]

Adding the settings-api keyword to keep this ticket grouped with all the related tickets.

[afercia]

FWIW, moving the description underneath the label is what we've tried also in the ​Settings API Enhanced project (unofficial project focused on rebuilding the Settings pages markup, semantics, and standardizing the input fields... so please don't look at the design!). It makes sense because it's a description related to a group of controls, as opposed to descriptions for single controls placed after the related control.

[helen]

Replying to melchoyce:

We agree with @joyously that moving the "These settings may be overridden..." caveat to underneath the label makes sense.

Sounds fine to me. Does it still need the parens?

We'd also recommend updating the text to read:

Allow people to post comments on new content (like posts, pages, and some custom post types)

Are you going to change all the usages of the word “article” here? I’m also not sure that “some custom post types” is necessary.

[melchoyce]

Sounds fine to me. Does it still need the parens?

Probably not anymore.

Are you going to change all the usages of the word “article” here? I’m also not sure that “some custom post types” is necessary.

Yeah, we should replace all "articles" with "content" and then add the extra posts/pages explanation to the first instance on the page. Do you think we shouldn't mention CPTs at all?