Facebook – Allow comments but no posts on the Facebook timeline

It appears there's no way to do this, unfortunately.

What I ended up doing was to do the going-forward arrangement, and then work back a couple of months, making corrections manually (#1). Better than nothing. There is also the issue of my comments on others' posts being visible. In my case, I think this is "good enough", though I do wish there was a better solution available (without programmering).

It might be possible to use the Facebook API to achieve this, but I didn't see anything ready-made with some quick searching.

Just get people to go to their messages and see if the offending comments showing in their timeline show up there. I can guarantee they won't. Because they now have timeline they can't go back and check their old wall posts so they assume the things they posted must have been private messages but they weren't. People used to post back and forth between their walls all the time before Facebook messaging became more widely adopted.

Anyway, as I said easiest way to check is to actually look through their messages. I did just that and none of them are appearing on my timeline.