How to enable comments and disable subscription

Using Ghost
1

Hi There,

I was wondering if is it possible to enable comments for my Ghost blog only and disable the subscription part completely.

When my blog grows, I will then consider using the subscription part of Ghost.

Regards.

2

People have to be ‘members’ of your blog to comment, but they don’t have to be paying members or signed up for a newsletter or anything. Make sense?

3

Thanks for your reply, Cathy.

Yes. It makes sense.

But my concern is, what happens if my blog has 3000 or more signed-up members? Does this involve extra costs for me?

When I create a new post and send it to all members as a newsletter reminder of the new post published, does that involve any cost?

4

Are you self hosting? Or if you aren’t, you should look at the plans of your hosting company.

5

Yes. I am self-hosting on Easypanel.

6

So then you will need to configure mail. You need transactional mail (smtp or mailgun or other options) and you need bulk mail (mailgun) if sending a newsletter.

Search the forum for how to get pay as you go (payg) from mailgun, which is free or cheap for low traffic.

7

Okay. Thanks for that info.

As I mentioned earlier if my Ghost blog has 3000 members for example and I only wanted comments on my Ghost blog and I send no newsletters out, will this be completely free?

And must you still set up SMTP for members to sign up and comment on your blog? If that is so, what is the best way to do that, please?

8

I don’t know anything about how Easypanel works, but unless their pricing says something about charging for Ghost members, then no, you shouldn’t be getting charged for members.

You must set up SOME mechanism of outgoing email (transactional email) in order to have your members be able to sign in and click the magic link. Unless Easypanel provides an outgoing SMTP server you can use, the two easiest options are probably Mailgun (be sure to ‘downgrade’ to the flex plan, which gets you 1000 free outbound emails per month before they start charging you) or using your gmail account (which I wouldn’t do in production, but is super easy).

Mailgun: Configuration - Adapt your publication to suit your needs
Gmail: How to deliver Ghost emails from your local dev setup

1 Like
9

Thanks again Cathy, for all the valuable information you have provided here.

It helps me understand Ghost more and thus makes me more comfortable using Ghost in the long run.

1 Like