The user federatedRoss is experiencing an issue where comments are only appearing as links on their WordPress site despite having the correct settings enabled for displaying comments via the WP-Discourse plugin. They are using webhooks to sync comments from Discourse, and while the webhook logs show successful communication, comments are not being displayed automatically. The issue is resolved when manually inserting the “Discourse Comments” Gutenberg block. After investigation, the problem is identified as a trust level restriction in Discourse, where users must have a trust level of 1 or higher to have their comments displayed. Since all users currently have a trust level of 0, their comments are not shown. The user seeks advice on how to bulk-update trust levels for over 100k users. angus advises considering trust levels as a community management issue and suggests using Discourse’s built-in tools or migration services for bulk updates, referencing the official Discourse documentation for guidance. federatedRoss acknowledges the help and clarifies that they are both the hosting provider and developers, marking this as their first exposure to Discourse.
In terms of using the comments block, I went into the post and put in the gutenberg block called “Discourse Comments”, and it just outputs the same link as the call to comments_template();
First off, thank you SO MUCH for your help. Sorry to have you digging on my behalf. I took some time to understand discourse and its features, and the issue became very apparent…
In my settings, the user must have a trust level of 1 or greater. Everyone has a trust level of 0 right now. This is a 35 yr old forum being moved over from some ancient tech, so there is tons of content being moved, but nothing that indicates trust level. I will adjust these for users.
Since there are well over 100k users, is there a solution for doing this in bulk?
Yes, there is, however I’d suggest considering this in some depth first as a community management issue before you consider how to do this programmatically. If you haven’t already done a deep-dive on trust levels check out
Then, if it were me, I’d identify a few groups of users (perhaps your old solution still had some kind of user grouping?) that you want to grant higher trust levels, i.e. 3 and 4. This will be mostly a manual process. For the lower levels, i.e. 1 and 2, it’d have to be in bulk. You could perhaps map some user metadata from your old forum to the trust level heuristics. Or come up with some basic rules. The code itself is relatively simple, but I wouldn’t just copy/paste the code in the topic for 100k users.
More broadly, your best bet would probably be for your discourse hosting provider to handle the migration for you, as this is something they often deal with and will have sophisticated solutions for.
