Option to set comments to Hidden on an individual piece of content (node), even when it has no comments
Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 comment fields provide three settings for the default, as configured at for example /admin/structure/types/manage/article/fields/node.article.comment:
The default value for this field, used when creating new content.
Comments
Open Users with the “Post comments” permission can post comments.
Closed Users cannot post comments, but existing comments will be displayed.
Hidden Comments are hidden from view.
But when creating or editing a node, the only options for comments are “Open” or “Closed”.
Oh. Oh. Ok.
If there are comments on a given node, only then is the hidden option shown when editing that node.
Unfortunately, ‘Hidden’ also hides the “Comments” title, but ‘Closed’ does not— they do not have identical effect on content without comments.
OK so 99% of the time setting comments to ‘Hidden’ by default going to work great (neither ‘Closed’ nor ‘Open’ radio button are selected in the node’s Comment settings), but then someone will hit the radio button to mark comments as ‘Closed’ for that content type, and then the heading “Comments” will appear, and there is no way to fix this through the UI.
The programmatic problems caused by this were addressed in Removal of “Hidden” option in comment settings form may break programmatic form submissions [#1181750] | Drupal.org.
The fact that having both hidden and closed on the default field form sets an incorrect expectation for the individual piece of content settings form was at least mentioned in Make comment settings form more usable [#989452] | Drupal.org.
But the fact that different options can and do behave differently when, even when there are no comments, has not been brought up.
Before i create or update an issue on drupal.org, am i missing something? Is there a way to ensure that ‘hidden’ and ‘closed’ truly do work exactly the same when there are no comments yet?