Remove Email Field from Comments

[lyndsaymoon]

Hello,

I found the way to remove the website and tags in comments under the SoftPress hints and tips, but I'd like to know how to remove the email field as well. and have looked through various forums with no luck.

I have unticked "Comment author must fill out name and e-mail " box, but both Name and Email are still there. My Customer wants the email field removed and Name to be left.

Any help is hugely appreciated. 🙂

http://www.demo.lyndsaymoon.com/themes/uww/understanding-working-women/

[David Chu]

Hi Lyndsay,
There is a method for doing that.

But before I mention that, I would recommend against that, I would strongly caution your client against that. While it probably sounds great to make it easy to comment, in practice this means that she'll probably get a firehosing of spam if she's not requiring name or email address. In fact, even with those, she'll have to deal with spam. For that I use Akismet plugin supplemented with NoSpamNX plugin. So you've been duly warned. 🙂

She might say, "that's the way it works in Facebook", but everybody there is logged in and duly identified. 🙂 You can actually set WP comments to work that way, too, by requiring people to open a user account and log in.

If she doesn't mind getting creamed... here's how to do it: with name and email requirement unticked, this line should work to take out the email, which is a default. This would go in your functions.php:

add_filter('comment_form_field_email', '__return_false');

Best, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[lyndsaymoon]

Hi David,

Thanks so much for your help with this it worked a treat! 🙂

I have cautioned her, but it's going to be an anonymous form for replies to go live straight away. I have added captcha to try and help.

[lyndsaymoon]

My Customer has now come back and said…

"Could you put the e mail box back in but put (optional)"

Is it an option, to have an optional email address field?

Thanks.

[David Chu]

Ha! Clients.....
That's getting a little gnarly, and frankly, begins to get beyond the scope of my free help. 🙂

I think you could get almost all that by keeping the requirement for email and name unticked. Then the whole thing becomes optional. And then if you want to remove the URL, you could do the following, very similar to above.

add_filter('comment_form_field_url', '__return_false');

It doesn't give you the "optional" caption, but the fields should indeed be optional.

Then you can tell her about moderation vs. no moderation. Most people don't want an additional "job" of moderation.

Good luck, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[lyndsaymoon]

Hi Dave,

I totally get where your coming from!!

Thanks so much for all your help, I really appreciate it 🙂

[David Chu]

Lyndsay,
I'm glad it helped, and nice talking with you again.

See you later,
Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

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