I’m a person that’s usually constantly tweaking my WordPress install. It’s a hobby. There are few things that provide as immediate of a sense of accomplishment as getting some sort of tweak or hack or plugin working and working well. It’s a far cry from my day job which has as its most exciting element the possibility of seeing a packet go from A to B in the appropriate manner. Woohoo. As such, I’ve come up with yet another plugin to enhance certain aspects of the WordPress experience.
WordPress 1.5 has some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. It’s surprisingly effective as long as you’re fairly proactive at keeping up with the blacklist. I was surprised one day to discover a slew of spam messages residing in the database. They weren’t displayed in my blog — though my customized asides plugin didn’t handle them perfectly and my comment counts were incorrect because they counted the spam comments which became my first clue that those comments were even in the database — and they weren’t visible in the admin interface. What the hell?
They’re there, you just can’t see them. They’ve been marked as spam by WordPress which is great. They probably are spam. But if you do happen to get a false-positive, you’ll never know about it unless you stumble across it like I did (yes, I had a couple of false positives and left some folks hanging). So, I came up with a plugin to let me see those comments if I choose, as well as provide some much-needed functionality to viewing comments in general.
Announcing the Paged Comment Editing plugin. No, doesn’t sound as fancy as the Image Headline plugin or even the Spell Checker plugin and your readers will reap no benefit, but it does have some merit for you, the WordPress author. This plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:
- Finally page through all of your comments in the comment administration interface. The stock interface is limited to displaying the 20 most-recent comments. If you’re anything like me, you’ll burn through 20 in 2 days tops. You’ll now be free to read and edit every comment on your installation with ease. This plugin supports paging through your comments, including arbitrary numbers of posts per page as well as paging of comment searching.
- See the comments that can’t be seen. WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn added some reasonably powerful if simplistic comment spam combating measures based on blacklists. This is wonderful, but if a comment happens to be tagged as spam by WordPress you will never see it again unless you do it external to WordPress via phpMyAdmin or something like it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing if a comment was inappropriately marked as spam. This plugin makes those invisible comments visible again… but only when you want them. With appropriate blacklist in place, 99% of the things marked as spam will be spam and you certainly don’t want to sift through that all day. But it’s nice to be able to rescue that 1% that otherwise would have disappeared into the ether.
If you’re interested in including this functionality in your WordPress 1.5 installation, see this page for installation details.
ColdForged Says:March 4th, 2005 at 11:37 am
You’re on the right track
. As I said, you’re welcome to delete them if it is your desire to, but don’t feel obligated. They aren’t visible to your readers in any sense and unless you’re running low on web space they don’t cause any damage. In the future, those comments may help to reduce the quantity of new spam comments you get.
Johnny Gulag Says:March 4th, 2005 at 11:32 am
So the comments listed under the “only spam” tab are not to be deleted they are there as a memory of the fact that they are spam? If I am correct then I am on the right track
Anywho really cool plug-in just what I have been wanting, an easier way to view all the comments in my database.
Thanks
ColdForged Says:March 4th, 2005 at 10:30 am
Thanks, Thor. Though I will say that you certainly don’t have to delete those spam comments if you don’t feel like it. The reason they’re there at all is so that future products — like the aforementioned Spam Karma 2.0 — can perhaps analyze the spam that you do get and use it to combat future spam. Those comments don’t take up a whole lot of space unless you’re talking several thousand (I have around 700 posts and 2000 comments and my total database usage is around 4M).
My primary goal was to go the other way: find the false-positives that were wrongly hidden. That said, you’re more than welcome to get rid of them if you want. But don’t feel like you have to
.
Gah! I still have to write that up. Don’t give up hope!
Awesome, Mark, I’m glad I could provide something to help the cause. Good luck with that next version!
p e r l w o r l d » Blog Archive » Comment Plugin Says:March 4th, 2005 at 7:51 am
[…] Comment Plugin coldforged has gone and created a nice improvement for the comment moderation admin page. It seems a slight oversight in the […]
Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net Says:March 4th, 2005 at 12:20 am
Spam Karma Hack: Spam Leftovers
One of the changes in WordPress 1.5 is that comment spam isn’t actually deleted when encountered by the built-in anti-spam measures, it is silently stored in your database and marked as spam. It won’t ever show up on your blog or in the interface, b…
Mark Says:March 3rd, 2005 at 10:43 pm
This is exactly what is going to be needed when work starts on Spam Karma 2.0
I’ve modified my install of Spam Karma 1.19 so that instead of deleting spam comments, it saves them as $approved=”spam” comments that will show up with your tool. This way we’ll have a nice collection of spam to analyze.
glo Says:March 3rd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
This plugin looks interesting even though I don’t get comment spam anymore. It doesn’t get in the front door and I like it that way. But, having the ability to review all comments is exactly what I need, just in case my spam protection gets compromised in the future, I would like to be able to easily detect it should that happen. The way it is currently setup, I have to look at each month’s post with the comments and that’s too time consuming. I do have comments turned off on my older posts but since I don’t add posts everyday, nor am I consistent with my posting times, I don’t want to implement the turn of comments after a given time frame plugin. So I review my comments almost every day. This would make that easier.
However, I haven’t upgraded to 1.5 yet. I have a test blog with 1.5 installed but I have to work out the theme aspects of this WP upgrade before I can upgrade my blog and the ones I manage. My layout is more complicated than the themes WP provides. I’m going to have to make some changes to my CSS before I can upgrade my blog. It shouldn’t be too hard once I figure out how it all works. I think I will incorporate this plugin when I make the change.
BTW where is that comment preview plugin? hint, hint …
Thor Says:March 3rd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
CoolTool, Brian! I installed it and immediately found almost 30 spam comments to delete from the database. As the saying goes, “ya done good kid, ya done good!” Thanks!
a man without letters Says:March 3rd, 2005 at 8:12 pm
New “CoolTool” plugin from Coldforged, he’s done it again!
Brian “Coldforged” Dupuis has gone and done it again. He announced a new plugin today, this one specifically for WP1.5, that helps root out and manage “spam” comments that might have been tagged and stopped as spam but are still showing up in the …
Blogging Pro Says:March 3rd, 2005 at 8:03 pm
WordPress Plugin: Paged Comment Editing
Paged Comment Editing plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities: