Well, what a can of worms …

[marybaum]

I have always hated the verb <em>notify</em> - just not as much as I hate <em>utilize</em> and <em>provide.</em> The reason: Grammatically, they may be verbs, but when it comes to real writing, they don't act like verbs. They don't act at all. They don't move - they just lie there, dead, like week-old fish carcasses, waiting for the trash, and smelling to high heaven in the meantime, with flies coming and going. How odd that people use these dead, smelly things to try to sound smart . . .

Anyway, tonight I finally decided to try to get rid of the two lines that start with "Notify me of  . . ." that appear under every comment box on every WordPress site under the sun - and replace them with something that actually moves, like "Email me when someone posts a followup comment."

Well. You would have thought I was looking for that Notre Dame football player's girlfriend.

I have searched and Googled and functioned now for six hours, thinking I should be able to figure this out. I've manipulated a lot of functions by now, in the last year or so, but it didn't work to write another instance of genesis_comment_form_ args - I got a nice white screen with this:

add_filter( 'genesis_comment_form_args', 'custom_comment_form_args' );
function custom_comment_form_args($args) {
$args['subscribe_comments'] = 'Email me when someone posts a followup.';
return $args;
}

I wish my php were better - I ought to be able to combine this with the title-reply function into an array, but this is obviously not the right name of the argument - it's only the CSS class. For some reason, I'm not finding the name of these two lines of copy in the php files - or I'm not reading the files carefully enough to see the names - nor have I come across the actual text anywhere. (Except in Jetpack.)

How come I can't find this text to edit in any copy of comments.php in Genesis, in my modified child theme or even on the WordPress Codex - or am I just blind?

Mary Baum

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Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀

[Bill Murray]

Do you have Jetpack activated? I think the origin of those lines is the Subscriptions module of Jetpack. If not Jetpack, you likely have another plugin that is modifying your comment form, because they're not part of the standard WP comment form, which Genesis doesn't modify.

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[marybaum]

I do, and that's the only place I could find the text, but I could have sworn I had Jetpack comments disabled because of what it did to my CSS. So I need to go back in and further disable the Jetpack comments - or edit the copy in Jetpack - Well, since I can find it there, I can edit it there. Thank you for  helping me not feel crazy.

MB

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Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀

[marybaum]

That worked! I kept running the search and seeing the phrase come up in Jetpack, and saying to myself, "But I"m not USING Jetpack comments!" Well, I've now edited the text, and the word notify is no longer smelling up at least that one site.

Hah!

Thanks again.

 

MB

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Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀

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