The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

I don't know why this wasn't discovered (or a better action put in by the WP folks to begin with that could be disabled) but I was able to find a way to disable the feeds from loading on the WordPress admin dashboard without any need for customized index.php files (which would need to be updated/re-uploaded every time WP is updated.)

I'm not sure why this isn't just a stock WP configuration option. It seems enough people have looked for ways around it. My biggest issue was that it requires connectivity directly with each RSS feed, which does not work very well behind our firewall at work. I'll be damned if I hack up some proxy-capable solution too for the feeds that we don't really even look at.

I knew that there had to be a way to mess with the actions being called to disable them from loading the Javascript, or make the fetch_rss() calls return nothing, or make the index-extras.php script return nothing... the easiest and apparently effective way was making a simple action trigger and finding the right order in which it was effective.

In the end, this is all the code that was required:

function remove_dashboard_feeds() {
   remove_action('admin_head', 'index_js');
}

add_action('admin_head', 'remove_dashboard_feeds', 1);

To make a long story short, I give you the "Remove Dashboard Feeds" plugin, located here. Just download, remove the .txt extension, throw it in the plugin directory and activate it. Simple enough. Works on WP 2.2, and probably 2.1. Not sure about earlier versions, but nobody should be running those anyway (keep up with the times as much as you can! Stay secure and optimized!)