WordPress Comment Clean up: Disabling Autolink In 5 Steps

By default, WordPress makes URL links clickable when people leave them in comments. If you are using wordpress websites that rely on interaction with your users, you could be opening yourself up to a possibility of risk: Spammers leaving links to dubious sites, others leaving links to their own websites for unauthorised self promotion, viruses and more. This could lead to your website being blacklisted if unchecked! Here is how to disable autolink in wordpress comment sections with 5 steps:

1. Plug In

It’s no debate that there are plug ins for virtually anything when it comes to WordPress. To disable auto linking, you can look for plug ins that are designed specifically for that, for example: No Comment Links. Simply install it and activate it- once you have successfully done so, you will see that all the comment section posts that contained links are now unlinked. You should not receive any more auto-linked URLs, so make sure to check.

2. Coding- automatic text links

If you don’t feel like using plug ins, you can still achieve the same effect by coding. Open up your functions.php file that is located in the theme folder [/wp-content/themes/<your-theme>/functions.php] and paste in this line: [remove_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘make_clickable’, 9);]. This should remove the auto-linking function on wordpress websites from now on, and also remove them from the previous comments as well.

3. Coding- HTML hyperlinks

An important thing to note is that even with the above measures, if your commenters know how to use HTML, they will still be able to add links to their commenting. So to completely remove that link option in your comment options, you can make use of these coding.

4. Comment Blacklist

To lighten the load of how much you have to sift through, take precautions beforehand by blacklisting certain content so that they will not appear on your wordpress website. Several wordpress developers have already begun creating blacklisting features designed to help disable autolink in wordpress by targeting blacklisted words and disallowing them from being posted. Come up with a list of possible words and add them into the blacklist options to create a cleaner comment space.

5. IP Blacklist

Pay attention to the comment section after you have successfully implemented these measures. If you find some undaunted commenters who just won’t stop however, it may be more productive to blacklist their IP address altogether. Though this is technically a last resort.