Comment Count+Link shouldn't be displayed when comments aren't open

[garretthyder]

Hello,

I noticed when using Disable Comments that disabling comments removed the feed but left behind the count link in the post meta block;

This is because sites can potentially have comments left over in their DB even though they've disabled comments. The code used;
( comments_open() || get_comments_number() )
Should simply use comments_open and not check the comment count, like so;
comments_open()

This is found throughout the site for displaying the link or the comment template, in both cases if comments are closed they should be suppressed.

I'm going to follow this with a quick PR shortly.

Cheers

[joyously]

This is based on an incorrect assumption. What is correct is that comments should be displayed if they exist.
The Disable Comments option only turns off the ability to add new comments. The ones that are there should be shown. If comments are disabled, the comment form should not be shown, but the comments should.

[kjellr]

Thank you for filing the issue, @garrett-eclipse!

The Disable Comments option only turns off the ability to add new comments. The ones that are there should be shown. If comments are disabled, the comment form should not be shown, but the comments should.

That's correct. Turning comments off does not typically hide existing comments — it just prevents new comments from being added. Since that's the case, I don't think it makes sense to hide the comment count in this case.

If a post has no comments, and comments are disabled, then the comment count will be hidden with the current setup.

Since this behavior is behaving as designed, I'm closing this as wontfix for now.

[garretthyder]

Thanks @joyously & @kjellr for pointing out the existing behaviour.

I see the conditional used matches the suggested convention here;
https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/template-files-section/partial-and-miscellaneous-template-files/comments/

It's too bad the existing convention makes it painful to strip comment functionality from themes when comments exist. I've had many clients get spammed to the point they want everything to do with comments hidden until they're able to clean them up. So I guess along with closing comments will have to filter get_comments_number to be 0 in order to suppress when comments exist.