Disable modern page comments globally for all sites in SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online

Those of you with Office 365/SharePoint Online have a simple path to disabling modern page commenting via the admin center. But for those of you, like myself, who also work in SharePoint 2019, your method involves PowerShell and is a bit more laborious. In this post, I’ll cover both methods: Disabling comments via PowerShell for SharePoint 2019 (server) and then via the admin center for SharePoint Online (O365).

Firstly, why disallow commenting altogether instead of giving site owners and page editors the choice? Some organizations have compliance regulations that require any sort of conversational transaction to meet certain criteria. Perhaps you only need to disable commenting temporarily while you build a case to prove compliance. Or perhaps you’ve determined it’s not compliant or have some other reason for wishing to globally disable page comments.

No matter your reasoning, here’s the how:

Disable modern page/news comments globally in SharePoint 2019 via PowerShell

The script below will iterate through all site collections in a web application, and all of the subsites within each site collection, and turn off page comments for sites that haven’t already had them disabled. This does not delete page comments. If you re-enable the feature later, the comments that were there previously will be restored.

Log onto a SharePoint server and run the following PowerShell script, replacing the site URL with your own web app’s URL:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-SPWebApplication "https://sharepoint.contoso.com" | Get-SPSite –Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
    if($_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled = "False")
    {
        $_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled = $True
        $_.Update()
        Write-Host "Disabled page comments on " $_.URL -ForegroundColor Green
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host "Page comments already disabled on " $_.URL -ForegroundColor Yellow
    }
}

If you want a read-out to validate current status (False = not disabled, True = disabled), you can run the following script (again, replacing the URL with the web app of your own):

Get-SPWebApplication "https://sharepoint.contoso.com" | Get-SPSite –Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
Write-Host $_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled $_.URL
}