When I first started blogging back in 2002 I enabled the comments feature because that’s what you did in those days. I got a few for a couple of years before spammers found me and I disabled that feature. Which left a comment box that couldn’t be used.

Earlier this year I spent a few hours trying to hunt these down which meant unchecking a box on each individual post. I couldn’t find a way to clean these up in one fell swoop. I had to uncheck the “Allow Comments” box on each post.

It occurred to me the job would be easier if I had a list of all the posts still showing the comment field so I asked Phil if his AI agent Milton could do this. A short time later I received an email from Milton.

Phil asked me to identify every post and page on smays.com that still has comments enabled. The attached HTML file is the clickable cleanup list. What I found:

– 6,567 published posts and 79 published pages checked
– 1,218 posts and 2 pages have comments enabled
– 1,220 items total

The report is grouped by year, and each title links directly to the live item. Open the attachment in a web browser and click any title to go to that post or page.

I used the site’s public WordPress inventory and reconciled it against the WordPress sitemap, so the coverage is complete as of July 31, 2026. WordPress reports these items as comment_status: open, and live checks confirm they display “Leave a Reply.” The site currently requires login to submit a comment.

The good news: I now had a list of all the posts that needed editing. The bad news: there are more than twelve hundred of them.

A day or so later Phil told me Milton (remember, we’re talking about an AI here) said it could do this task for me if I gave it the UN/PW for my blog. Temping, but I’m not ready to do that. Yet.

So I’m doing the clean-up one post at a time but it goes quickly and provides an opportunity to review some old posts, always interesting.