‘Comments are closed’ on new WordPress blog.

So my WordPress love affair lasted about an hour.
Then I spent a good while trying to figure out why comments were disabled on all my shiny new WordPress posts.
There’s a global setting for enabling comments which was turned on, but I probably turned that on after noticing the problem – I forget what I did in the first few minutes. Still, none of my five blog posts permitted comments.
I tried changing to the standard WordPress themes in case my Artisteer theme was the cause.  The first one was the same – just had no comments section in the post.  The next displayed ‘Comments are closed’ or something similar.

I couldn’t find where to authorise comments for individual posts.  Eventually I found it: edit the post and click on ‘Screen Options’.  Then tick the ‘Discussion’ and ‘Comments’ boxes.

When you scroll down past the post, the settings for permitting or disabling comments will magically appear.

Now I call this counter-intuitive.  While the ‘Screen Options’ button may be handy for experienced users who like uncluttered screens, I think everything should be turned on here at install time.  At least turn on things as fundamental as comments.

It occurs to me that perhaps everything is usually turned on but I turned some of it off while looking for something else.  As this is quite likely to happen to a newbie, steps should be taken to advise the user what is happening.

With other tools I don’t mind a learning curve so much – you expect it.  But you are encouraged to think that there is no learning curve with WordPress, then they do this kind of thing.  The ‘kitchen sink’ setting, turned off by default when editing posts, is a similar time-waster.

What?

Why?

No-one else does this!  Stop!