Turn comments off by default for attachment pages (or make is easier to do so without code)

[zodiac1978]

If a new user is installing WordPress the first time, it lasts some time until the first spam comment appears. Typically, they now disable comments on Settings -> Discussion.

First problem: this is just disabling the comments for future posts.

Now they learn about bulk editing posts, which works fine.

But the website is now online for some time and more media is uploaded, and now the spam comes to the next open comment form: on attachment pages.

Not sure if attachment pages follow the setting from the discussion page, but there will be many media items with open comments.

Now we have the second problem: On the grid view, there is no way to disable the comments at all (you need to follow a link to get to the single media edit page).

On this page you need to customize the screen options to enable the meta box, and now you can disable the comments for this media item. This has to done manually for every media item with open comments (but there is no way to see if the comments are open - so you need to edit every media item).

This could be a real pain for websites with many media items.

I would recommend changing the behavior and have comments on attachment pages turned off by default.

I think it will be easier to educate theme developers to turn them on again if the theme uses them (e.g. photography themes) as documented here:
​https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/07/06/comments-are-now-turned-off-on-pages-by-default/

This is already discussed in the comments on this post.

Related tickets: #12991 and #21391

Another way could be to use the idea of this comment:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12991#comment:22

If turning the default to off is not possible, we could use the bulk edit to enable/disable the comment/pingback/trackback feature.

The need for such a feature could be seen in the plugin directory, as there are more than one plugin for disabling comments on attachment pages (and more):
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/smart-attachment-page-remove/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments-rb/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/comments-plus/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments-on-attachments/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments-by-click5/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/no-page-comment/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-media-comment-spamming/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments-wpz/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-post-comments/
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/close-comments-on-media-attachment/

These add up to more than a million active installations.

[antpb]

Worth noting that #57913 is being considered to turn off attachment pages by default. If this were the case, does this solve core desire to not have comments for attachments on new installs?

I would assume if folks wanted to enable pages for attachments that they would expect the same functionality as posts default behavior (comments on)

[zodiac1978]

Replying to antpb:

Worth noting that #57913 is being considered to turn off attachment pages by default. If this were the case, does this solve core desire to not have comments for attachments on new installs?

Hard to say. Maybe not. If #57913 will disable attachment pages for new sites, maybe we shouldn't break the past behavior and let comments open.

I would assume if folks wanted to enable pages for attachments that they would expect the same functionality as posts default behavior (comments on)

Yes, I agree, but I what if they do not want comments? I still think there is a UX problem here. Assuming I have a photography site which is using attachment pages, but I do not want to allow comments on them. What can I do? I need to edit every single media item, which is a pain.

So if #57913 gets into 6.3, I would recommend adding at least a bulk editing feature to media items to change this easier. This would close the feature gap to posts/pages.

What do you think @antpb?