It was discovered that posts were set up allowing comments and pingbacks, which are a special type of comment created when you link to another blog post, as long as the other blog accepts pingback. This post walks through steps on how to turn off comments for new blog posts, but older posts will need to have the setting turned off individually. We will walk through the steps on how to turn off comments for older posts:

Go to the Posts page

Click on checkbox next to Title, which will select all of the posts on the page:

All of the posts on the page will now be checked:

Click on the down arrow to the right of Bulk actions and select Edit from the list in dropdown and click on the Apply button:

The section below will drop down. Please make the changes as highlighted below and click on Update.