"Link to Comments Without Displaying Them" option not working

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“Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” Option Not Working

jtbayly reported that the “Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” option is not working as expected. When selecting this option, comments are hidden, but the link to comments and the “join the discussion” button do not appear.

simon explained that the comment link is displayed in the comments template, which requires comments to be enabled. This means that the link will not appear if comments are not displayed.

jtbayly expressed confusion about this behavior, expecting the “Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” option to allow other settings and functionality to work without loading and displaying actual comments from Discourse.

simon acknowledged that this behavior can be changed and asked if it would solve the problem.

jtbayly clarified that they expect the “Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” option to still allow other settings and functionality to work, just without loading and displaying actual comments from Discourse.

jtbayly ultimately made a feature request to have separate options for each of the display features, such as comments, participants, simple comment links, and complex comment links.

simon updated the input for the settings to a dropdown with radio buttons and acknowledged that the description of the Enable Discourse Comments setting needs improvement.

1

This feature is not working for me: Link to Discourse topics in Wordpress Without Displaying Comments

If I select that option, it does hide the comments, but I don’t see the link to comments (or the “join the discussion” button).

By the way, it seems like those two check boxes should be a dropdown, or at least radio buttons in a group, since you can only select one or the other.

Edited to add:
By the way, I’m ultimately wanting to display the topic-map as being worked on over here: Embedding Topic topic-map or Topic Summary on Other Site - #13 by jtbayly
I’ve got that working in a test environment, but the topic map also only shows if I choose to display comments. Might be unrelated, though.

2

The comment link is displayed in the comments template. This means that for most cases you will need to have comments enabled for the post in order for the link to be displayed.

If you have comments enabled and you’re still not seeing the link, check the settings beginning with ‘Join Discussion:’ on the WP Discourse Text Content options page. If you’re still having trouble with this, can you let me know which theme you are using?

3

I’m still really confused about why this works the way it does, but maybe it’s working as intended? What I see matches the screenshots, but not what I’m expecting given the descriptions of the settings.

Why does the “Discourse Link” never get used unless I display the actual comments? More particularly, why do I only get a single button and not the text of the “Join the Discussion” setting, which is described as “Text used after posts with comments on Discourse, but no comments that are displayed on Discourse. This is combined with the ‘Discourse link text’ to create a link to your forum.”?

Likewise, why does the participants heading and participants display disappear when I don’t display comments?

Screenshots to show what I’m asking about:
Here’s a post with no comments. I wouldn’t expect changing the setting to load comments or not to make any difference. But it does make a big difference:

23%20AM
23%20AM1912×394 70.5 KB

vs comments not loaded:

47%20AM
47%20AM1910×284 25.4 KB

Likewise, a lot changes based on loading or not loading comments after there are a comment or two:

59%20AM
59%20AM1922×1078 150 KB

vs

36%20AM
36%20AM1906×258 14.2 KB

4

The Discourse Link is displayed in a comment template, so it requires comments to be enabled. I think this can be changed. Would that solve your problem?

5

Sorry, but I’m confused. Do you mean it requires WP comments to be enabled, or that it requires “Use Discourse Comments” to be enabled? Or both?

Big picture, I would expect that “Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” would still allow all the other settings and functionality to work, just without loading and display actual comments from Discourse. In fact, I would also expect that by choosing that setting, WP comments could even be turned off without breaking any functionality, since we aren’t actually displaying any comments. (But that’s a separate issue: Why enable wordpress post comments? - #13 by jtbayly)

Does that make sense?

I think a workaround could be to just turn on comment loading, then enable the “Only Import Moderator-Liked” setting. But that would require me to ban moderators from liking posts. Seems like a bad idea. lol

6

Ok, after revisiting this, I guess really what I’m doing is making a feature request to have separate options for each of the display features. From what I can tell, there are comments, participants, simple comment links and complex comment links. Perhaps there are others that I’m missing. In the future, I guess topicmap could be another display feature.

Anyway, right now it appears that complex links and participants just show up when comments are displayed. And simple links are shown when comments are not displayed.

I think in the end what I’ll want is the topicmap (once that’s working well) and the complex comment links. I’m just not sure how to get there without separating out the display options more than they currently are—hence the feature request.

7

The input for these settings has been updated to this:

41%20PM

Selecting the option opens a radio input:

56%20PM

When updating the plugin from versions prior to 1.7.7, the Enable Discourse Comments setting will be checked if either the Use Discourse Comments or the Link to Comments Without Displaying Them options were enabled. The value of the radio buttons will be set to the value that was set for the previous options.

The description of the Enable Discourse Comments setting isn’t great. I’ll improve it.