I am working on a private site where the comments need to be hidden. I know how to remove the comments feed from the header, but can anyone give me some instructions on how to disable the comments feed altogether. Because all you need to do is add /feed/ to the single post and then you can see the comments feed.

I tried creating feed-atom-comments.php, and feed-rss2-comments.php, and that still did not work.

I am working on a private site where the comments need to be hidden. I know how to remove the comments feed from the header, but can anyone give me some instructions on how to disable the comments feed altogether. Because all you need to do is add /feed/ to the single post and then you can see the comments feed.

I tried creating feed-atom-comments.php, and feed-rss2-comments.php, and that still did not work.

• comments
• feed

• Related: Disable insertion of the sitewide comments feed URL in HTML header: wordpress.stackexchange/questions/56695/… – jerclarke Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 1:04
• Related: Disable insertion of per-post comments feed URLs in HTML header: wordpress.stackexchange/questions/190509/… – jerclarke Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 1:05

2 Answers 2

Something like this should work.

function wpse45941_disable_feed( $comments ) {
    if( $comments ) {
        wp_die( 'No feed available' );
    }
}
add_action('do_feed', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );

Note: I haven't tested that at all, I just wrote it right into the answer box.

Disable only the individual-post comment feeds

An alternate version of mor7ifer's answer, this one only disables the per-post comment feeds, and not the site-wide comments feed (by checking for is_single() before doing wp_die()).

It also uses the 410 error code which means GONE and seems appropriate for this use-case (at least for me, where these URLs already existed and are indexed, and I want to unequivocally tell Google and friends to stop indexing).

function wpse45941_disable_feed( $comments ) {
    if( $comments and is_single() ) {
        wp_die( 'Feeds for comments on single posts have been disabled.', 410 );
    }
}
add_action('do_feed', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );

Disable all comment feeds

Here's the same code with the 410 HTTP status, but it will also disable the sitewide comments feed (and shows an appropriate message):

function wpse45941_disable_feed( $comments ) {
    if( $comments ) {
        wp_die( 'Feeds for comments have been disabled.', 410 );
    }
}
add_action('do_feed', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wpse45941_disable_feed',1 );

Note: This doesn't fix the <item> for each post in the normal RSS feed

On further inspection, I've found the following error when validating the main (posts) RSS feed for my site:

It seems WP is still inserting the comments RSS tag into the feed, but because that feed is disabled, it generates an error.

RSS still works, but I'm looking for a solution to get rid of it. This Core Trac issue is relevant