How do you delete comments?

Using Ghost
1

I tried to delete a comment earlier. Couldn’t find the option on the post or in the editor or in the analytics page for the post or on the members page or anywhere else. I could find an option to report from the post, which doesn’t delete the comment. The report sent me an email, the email told me I could just delete the comment from the post, but I can’t. It doesn’t totally make sense that I would be able to delete the comment from the post, does it? I’m not actually logged into the admin panel when I’m looking at the post, I’m logged in as a subscriber, those seem to be different accounts, aren’t they?

Anyway, I figured out that Ghost has a weird “impersonate” feature that let me delete the comment, which… doesn’t seem like it’s the right way to do that…

How am I supposed to delete comments?

2

I was curious too, so I checked my site to make sure.

I am using the original comment functionality that Ghost officially provides. I have not checked about customizing it.

It is true that you may not be able to delete comments directly with any sort of admin rights, as you are saying.
However, I have found a way to delete comments if I am an administrator and I will share it with you.

Use the Impersonate function:

Here are the specific instructions I tried.

  1. first you need to know who wrote the comment you want to delete. Once you have found the poster of the comment, go to the Members page as an administrator, find the user you just identified in Members, click on the gear symbol, and click on Impersonate.
  2. Now you can access the site as that user from the URL provided, go to the comment you want to delete, and simply Delete it.

I have confirmed that I can delete comments this way. Please let me know if there is a better way.

1 Like
3

I feel certain that you have both read this Comments

So, I’m wondering exactly what it is that you need to achieve and why.

For example, since you can make a comment hidden, users from all membership tiers will not be able to see it.

Having said that, the comment hasn’t been deleted from the server and perhaps that is what concerns you. Doing that isn’t possible as far as I know on GhostPro. Perhaps it can be if you own the server - another better qualified on the subtleties of the comments file structure can offer a view below for you I expect.

Then there’s the issue of requesting the commenter to delete it.

And there’s a good recent discussion on the forum on the topic of permanently deleting a user who keeps coming back and signing up again. I realise that isn’t your question.

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I have not seen this, but this does not work. Putting aside the fact that not being able to actually delete the comments is a huge issue, I see no option whatsoever to hide the comment. For what it’s worth, I do not and will not use Google Chrome, but my browser is standards-compliant and if the Ghost team is writing code to operate on the internet, and not exclusively on Google Chrome, that should not be a problem. If that is the problem, it’s one I expect to be fixed immediately.

5

yeah, I mentioned the impersonate feature, this does work but it’s a weird workaround and it sounds like a bad thing to do, I don’t want to “impersonate” anybody, I want to use my own admin powers to delete a comment, that should work.

6

After I posted my last comment, I tried everything, but like you, I could not delete it except by using the Impersonate function.

I have not read all of the documentation, but it is odd that there is no functionality to delete in the admin area in the first place.

At any rate, I use this “weird” Impersonate function to manage my comments (it’s inconvenient).

As you now know from another thread, the ability to “permanently” delete comments is currently under discussion; the commenting feature in Ghost may not be perfect yet.

I apologize for not being able to provide you with useful information.

1 Like
7

Extra weirdly, it looks like the poster can “unhide” or “undelete” them, too? Or maybe I was running up against some cache/cookie weirdness in my testing. I’ll need to test further.

I played with the comments API a bit. Comments that are hidden or deleted have no content returned from the API (that’s good!), but they do have that placeholder box. Linked above is the other thread with a solution for hiding hidden/deleted content. It’s also possible to pass in a custom css file that hides that content, which may be a little more robust than the javascript solution.

It wouldn’t be too hard to build an interface for displaying and “deleting” comments, but to accomplish something that really feels like deletion is going to require hiding the deleted content, too…

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