Disabling email addresse for guests and disable comment in selected articles

Hi Sylwester,

Thank you for testing CommentBox and for your kind words — much appreciated!

Regarding your questions:

Guest email field

At the moment, the email address is required for guest users and there is no option to make it optional. This is mainly for moderation, spam prevention, and basic user identification.

That said, we understand the use case you describe and it is something we may consider for a future version.

Disabling comments on specific pages/articles

You can control the comment status (open / closed / disabled) on a per-page basis through the Pages section in the CommentBox component backend.

Pages automatically appear there as soon as a comment is posted.

If you want to manage this proactively, you can manually create a page record in advance by entering the page URL, and set its comment status accordingly — no comments are required for the page to appear.

Thanks again for your feedback and for using CommentBox!

Best regards,
Lefteris

Hello,

Thank you for the detailed feedback — this is very helpful.

Regarding the guest email field, your reasoning makes perfect sense, especially since comments are moderated anyway. We’ve noted this as a feature request and we’ll seriously consider adding an option to disable or make the guest email field optional in a future version.

About disabling comments on a specific article:

When a page is set to disabled in the CommentBox backend, the comment form should not be displayed. If you are still seeing the form after disabling comments, this is almost certainly due to page caching.

In most cases this happens when:

• Joomla page cache is enabled
• A server-side cache is active (LiteSpeed, NGINX, etc.)
• A CDN such as Cloudflare is serving a cached version of the page

Please try the following:

1. Clear Joomla cache
2. Clear any server-side cache (if applicable)
3. Purge CDN cache (Cloudflare, etc.)
4. Reload the page in a private/incognito window

Once the cache is cleared, the comment form should no longer appear on pages where commenting is disabled.

Regarding the displayed message:

CommentBox currently shows a message (e.g. “Comments are closed for this page”) only when comments are set to closed.

When comments are set to disabled, the form is simply hidden and no message is displayed.

Thanks again for your feedback and for using CommentBox. If the issue persists after clearing the cache, feel free to let me know and I’ll be happy to take a closer look.

Best regards,
Lefteris

Hello,

Great to hear that everything is working correctly now — thanks for confirming.

Yes, LiteSpeed cache can easily cause this kind of behavior, so clearing it was exactly the right step.

Thank you also for the additional clarification regarding anonymous guest comments. Your explanation is absolutely valid, and we agree that there are cases where allowing comments without an email address makes sense, even if follow-up communication is not possible. We’ve clearly noted this feedback and it will be taken into account when evaluating future improvements.

Thanks again for testing CommentBox and for taking the time to share such thoughtful suggestions. If you have any other questions or ideas, feel free to reach out anytime.

Best regards,
Lefteris