20 Jul 2011

Styling Tip: Hide Guest Commenting

It’s been way too long since we last updated our blog – our apologies for the radio silence. I wanted to share a handy bit of CSS to help you further customize the way your readers can post comments to your site. While we offer a couple of different ways to comment – as a guest or using their Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, or IntenseDebate account – there wasn’t a way to disable guest commenting while still enabling Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in.

But, as you may know, we offer a super-easy way to add custom CSS to bring your own personal style to IntenseDebate through your Custom CSS page. By adding a handy snippet of CSS, you can hide the guest commenter information fields (Name, Email, URL), which will effectively remove the option to post comments as a guest.

Why is this cool?

I’m glad you asked. Currently commenters that post using Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in are considered guest commenters since they aren’t posting with an IntenseDebate or WordPress.com account. The issue is that if you disable guest commenting in your moderation settings by requiring readers to have an IntenseDebate or WordPress.com account, you would remove the options to post using Facebook Connect and Twitter Sign-in, which isn’t ideal.

So without further ado, here’s the CSS you can add to your Custom CSS page to get rid of guest commenting:

#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-postnav-label,
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-m.idc-signup {
display: none !important;
}
#idc-container-parent #idc-container
.idc-postnav-list {
margin: 5px 0 8px;
}

That last little bit adjusts the margin to make up for the hidden fields so there isn’t a gaping space where the guest commenter fields used to be. Feel free to tweak that as you’d like.

Make sure you check out our CSS documentation, along with the rest of our guides to change the font size; text, background, and link colors; width of the comment section; and move the comment box to the top of the comment section.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features


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11 Comments

  1. This CSS is a basic workaround for hiding the guest commenting option. If they were determined to post as a guest, then they could via browser extension, but on the whole this bit of CSS will do the trick.

    Comment by Michael — July 21, 2011 @ 4:19 pm
  2. Got it, thanks Mike.

    Comment by Rafael Fischmann — July 21, 2011 @ 4:22 pm
  3. thx for the tips

    Comment by unclehyree — August 11, 2011 @ 4:45 am
  4. Thanks a lot for the tip … i was just searching for the same and suddenly google redirect me to this page..

    Comment by HariGeek — August 16, 2011 @ 7:30 am
  5. thx for the tip

    Comment by OldGoaler — August 31, 2011 @ 1:22 am
  6. Thank you for the Tips 🙂

    Comment by Kelvin Castelino — September 25, 2011 @ 3:00 am
  7. Makes sense and works well – cheers guys.

    Comment by worldwideparcel — October 11, 2011 @ 10:03 am
  8. Great Job 🙂 Nice tips. TY

    Comment by kredyciki1 — November 14, 2011 @ 5:14 pm
  9. Thank you very much!

    Comment by jeniferex — November 26, 2011 @ 12:20 am
  10. Nice thanks Michael, I've been trying to figure out how to do this.

    Comment by Bonjour Tristesse — December 3, 2011 @ 4:45 pm
  11. Hi, tried this. it hides Name, Website and email address field. but if somebody types in the Comment area without logging in and hit submit button, then it asks for Username which is hidden by css trick. i feel it's odd message. is there any workaround.

    Comment by Gopal Thorve — January 5, 2012 @ 5:43 am

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