I thought that WP-Discourse wouldn’t show comments from private categories on my public Wordpress pages.
My plan was to have my patrons be able to comment on advance pages in this locked Preview Pages category, and then I’d move the comic’s Topic to the public Page Updates category once the comic page was also made public. That way my patrons could comment on the page without spoiling things, but they wouldn’t have to input their comments twice for the general readership to be able to read them later.
I thought it had worked in testing too. But now I’m seeing comments from the private category showing up on the linked Wordpress page.
Did I miss a step? Did I misunderstand how WP-Discourse would behave with linked Wordpress pages in private categories?
If you have selected the plugin’s ‘Display comments’ option, it will display comments for any posts that you have published from WordPress to Discourse. I’ll be adding a filter to the plugin early this week that can be used to control whether or not the comments template gets loaded for a specific page.
It might also be good to add an option to the plugin to not display comments from protected categories. I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before.
What is the plugin that you’re using to protect your WordPress pages?
Both those upgrades you mentioned sound awesome. I think it would make a lot of sense to have the option to automatically not display comments from protected categories. I’m also surprised this hasn’t come up before, but I guess I’m your official canary in the coalmine.
I’m using Patreon Plugin Pro which I’ve tweaked a little bit to work with my webcomic site.
For now, should I just disable the link in the Wordpress post?
P.S. For what it’s worth, having the comment template load on the page actually helps me a bit in this scenario, because it also automatically disables the Disqus comments on the page unless I manually input a comment in the Edit Page metabox. Not sure what will happen if the Discourse comments template doesn’t load at all for an individual page.
I suppose for me my ideal result would be to load the comments template (thus showing a live link to where to comment on my Discourse site, as well as disabling the Disqus comments) while still not showing any individual comments from the protected category.
Your case is tricky since you want the comments template to load, but not load the Discourse comments. The easiest way to handle it would be for me to make a small update to the plugin.
For now, if you are able to figure out how to target your protected pages with CSS, you could hide the Discourse comments with CSS. The CSS can probaby be less specific than this:
Thank you, Simon. I really appreciate you looking into this.
I think the easiest solution for now, especially if you’ll be updating the plugin this week, is just for me to Unlink the page from Discourse. So I’ll do that. Thank you for the suggestion.
And yes, if you can look into this, that would be great. Obviously, how I want things to work with Disqus is my own unique deal, but I do think there’s a good argument for why it would make sense to have the Discourse Comments Template still load (without showing specific comments) for linked pages in a Private topic. That way there would be a live link at the bottom of the Wordpress page for folks who can access the Private category, which I think makes sense and would be more convenient than having to manually add that link in the content of the page every time.
Thank you for being so helpful and responsive. You rock!
Obviously, how I want things to work with Disqus is my own unique deal, but I do think there’s a good argument for why it would make sense to have the Discourse Comments Template still load (without showing specific comments) for linked pages in a Private topic. That way there would be a live link at the bottom of the Wordpress page for folks who can access the Private category, which I think makes sense and would be more convenient than having to manually add that link in the content of the page every time.