Comments on: Remove the Website Field From the Comment Form

By: Kaifu Computing

Kaifu Computing — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:42:35 +0000

I agree with Yuki, checking to see if either http:// or https:// exists in the website field is a neater solution.

However entirely removing the field is a perfectly valid way to fix the problem, and as you say, websites with readership who are not tech savvy will more often than not leave the field blank anyway.

By: Kwika

Kwika — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:38:04 +0000

I wonder if removing the URL field would reduce the amount of comment spam. It would certainly manual spamming but how about those scripts they are using.

By: Jay Kumar

Jay Kumar — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 04:58:50 +0000

A neat solution for the problem that was bugging me for some time. I run the website of a professional organization and many members have asked me what to write in the Website field. I used to tell them to leave it blank.

I was thinking of adding (optional, you may leave it blank) next to Website. As my members don’t have their own websites, removing the field is ideal for me.

Thanks.

By: markov

markov — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:31:05 +0000

actually i’ve commented out the email and website fields. the result is an error message that says

Error: please fill the required fields (name, email).

now what?

By: Joel

Joel — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:11:15 +0000

I like it, a very simple fix. Of course, we could regex it or something similar, but if you just want to hide the field, this works great!

By: a.erol

a.erol — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:34:39 +0000

Better to have there a website name as default! So if we commenters want to change it, we can, otherwise, we will leave it unchanged!

By: Yuki

Yuki — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:46:33 +0000

You can leave “Website” field, but just check if it contains “http://” or not. It’s a more correct way, I think.

By: wordpress php freak

wordpress php freak — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:46:50 +0000

I think leaving a website is not a bad option to have. It encourages people specially who have blog to pass sometime valuable comments about your site.

By: Teli Adlam

Teli Adlam — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:15:55 +0000

Hi Eric,
In general, I agree with you. However, to accomplish the checks necessary would require far more tweaking and coding (which could possibly involve modifying core files) than the simple fix of removing the URL option and in some cases it would be overkill, plus it wouldn’t account for the people who put in random URLs (e.g. google.com, msn.com, aol.com, & so forth).

Removing the URL field isn’t a new idea; certain publications that don’t warrant a majority of their users leaving a link will remove the option, for instance The New York Times blogs, without adversely impacting the interaction of their readership.

For the blogs that don’t need to worry about such a problem, URL checking/field removal isn’t necessary. Using this one as an example, I leave it intact because a majority of the commenters will understand that it’s optional and it’s extremely rare that I receive a gibberish URL (that isn’t attached to a spam comment).

~ Teli

By: Erik Curtis

Erik Curtis — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:12:20 +0000

I would prefer some logic in the code to look at the characters in the field, then varify that they contain one of the valid endings to a domain name. For examlple, it must contain .com, .net, .org, ..ect.

A list of valid domain suffix can be found at http://www.norid.no/domenenavnbaser/domreg.html