Use Shutup.css to remove comments from websites

Reader’s comments at the end of an article or blog post are an important part of the blog, but this is true only if the comments add value to the discussion. Unfortunately, most comments you come across blogs are inane and purposeless left by either spammers or trolls. If comments on a page distract you or offend your intelligence, there is a way to get rid of them.

Blogger Steven Frank has put together a user stylesheet which when applied to a browser automatically hides the comment section from that page. This stylesheet works on almost any website.

The stylesheet named Shutup.css is designed to hide comments from many popular website including some of the most notorious like YouTube and Digg. Shutup.css achieves this by setting the DIVs and CLASSes used by these sites to “display:none”. The default Wordpress class for comments, “commentlist”, is also added which pretty much affects all website running on Wordpress unless that site uses a different class name. Any website that uses CLASS name comment, comments, commentarea, commentwrapper and a few other variations come within the scope of this stylesheet.

Shutup.css can be downloaded to the hard disk and used as a custom stylesheet for the browser or used directly from the author’s site. In the latter case, any update to the stylesheet will be automatically reflected in your browser. Downloading the stylesheet to your hard disk, on the other hand, allows you to edit it such as add or remove sites from the list. You might have to do this if you want to add exception to a site.

How to use it

Firefox users will need to install the Stylish plug-in to use Shutup.css.

Chrome users will have to use the equivalent Chrome plug-in, which is provided at the bottom of the Shutup.css page.

Safari users can add the stylesheet from the Preference window, also shown on the page.

The one browser for whose instructions were not provided is Opera. So here is how to do it in Opera.

With Opera you cannot use a “live” stylesheet, that is, the auto-updating one. You have to download it. Copy the stylesheet to the user CSS directory of Opera. Now where do you find that? Easy. Click on Help>About Opera in Opera and get the location of the User CSS directory under “Path”.

Once the file has been copied, click on View>Style and choose shutup-1.2.css.