Facebook pages don’t come with a limit on the number of followers. Unlike profiles which allow a limit of 5000 friends in the list, pages are a different story.
With so many potential followers commenting on posts, it can be hard to maintain order. Lots of page administrators also like to post certain videos or information without having followers comment on the topic, especially when it’s controversial.
In order to maintain some order or to simply avoid having to read profanity in the comments, administrators prefer to disable comments on some Facebook pages. Here’s how you can do this too.
Hiding Comments
Disabling comments on a Facebook page is not something you can do by checking a box. Facebook doesn’t have such a feature built-in. However, there is a workaround to this common problem.
As a page administrator, you can block certain words from appearing in the comments. It involves using a filter, commonly used for profanity or hate speech.
The beauty of this feature is that you can add any word to the list of unwanted words. For example, you can add the word ‘the’ to the filter list. If you do that there’s a high chance that lots of comments won’t show up on your Facebook page.
You don’t have a limit on how many words you get to add to the list. After you’re satisfied with the words you’ve added, here’s what happens.
Comments containing any of the banned words will appear as ‘…’ for you and other viewers. The people that posted them can still see them in the original format.
This comes in real handy for two reasons. For one, using just a couple of common words lets you hide most incoming comments.
Secondly, instead of just blurring out a couple of words, you hide entire comments. Racial slurs or hate speech may still maintain their meaning if just a few bad words are hidden, but you won’t have to worry about that if you use the filter.
If you want to read the comment, you can click on the ‘…’ message and read the original text. You’ll also have the option to allow it or hide from public view.
How to Use the Filter
1. Settings
From your Facebook page, you have to locate the Settings link. It should be in the upper right of the page.
2. Page moderation
From there you go to the General tab. You then locate the section titled Page Moderation. Click on the Edit link.
3. Keyword List
A box will appear which should already contain some banned words. If it doesn’t, that’s ok. You’ll be adding your own soon.
This is where you can start adding words to the forbidden list. You can type them in or you can upload a . txt file that contains words you want to hide.
Advantages and Disadvantages
The advantage of using the filter to disable comments is that you can keep your page clean and non-controversial.
The downside is that this disables almost all incoming comments, if you have a big list of keywords. You can’t disable comments for specific posts only. You’ll have to read comments one after another to decide which ones you want to show.
Another minor downside is that the filter doesn’t work for Facebook groups or personal profile pages.
Tips and Tricks
Now, you may be wondering just what type of words to use. If you want to make sure no comments are shown, just add the most popular or most commonly used words. Keep in mind that Facebook won’t translate them for you.
So, while you may be adding half the Oxford dictionary, the comments written in foreign languages will likely still show up.
Here are some words you should definitely think of using in the filter: the, of, and, in, is, that, not, but, use, he, she, if, etc.
The list is not case-sensitive so you don’t have to bother with capping the first letter of names, countries, etc.
Focus on what people use most often when typing. Also, don’t forget to add some commonly used abbreviations.
If you want to spend as little time as possible doing this, you should use premade lists of commonly used words. Copying some popular profanity filters is also a good idea if you want to be thorough. Don’t rely on Facebook’s integrated profanity filter as there are plenty of clever individuals that can find a way around it.
