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.
41 Responses to ““Where the hell are my comments?””
WordPress Plugin: Paged Comment Editing
Paged Comment Editing plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:
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 …
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!
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 …
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.
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…
[...] Comment Plugin coldforged has gone and created a nice improvement for the comment moderation admin page. It seems a slight oversight in the [...]
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!
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
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.
So I used the one click install to install this plugin, and when I made my way to the Manage Comments page, there were no comments there to manage. Where did I go wrong?
So if you deactivate the plugin and go to that page your comments show up?
Yes
A couple of things: The tarball link is boned up. Also, the last PHP stanza in the file (line 340) starts with <? instead of <?php. (Or at least, in the tarball version this is true)
And a suggestion/comment, a similar feature would be nice for moderation. Due to neglect, I hit 700 comments awaiting moderation which, displayed on one page, hit the 30-second runtime limit set on PHP here at about the ~350 mark. So a similar “entries per page” for that would be nice, but probably not important.
Ok, here is my problem, I just installed and activated this plugin. When I try to manage comments, it loads this address:
http://www.ensellitis.com/wp-admin/C:%5CDomains%5Censellitis.com%5Cwwwroot%5Cwp-content%5Cplugins%5Cedit-comments-full.php
Which is wrong, obviously, so I tried deleteing all that other crap and I get this:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: is_plugin_page() in C:\Domains\ensellitis.com\wwwroot\wp-content\plugins\edit-comments-full.php on line 370I am using 1.5-gamma, is that causing this problem?
And how did you do that spam prevention enter a word thingy?? I like that =)
Damned Windows user
. It may very well be a gamma thing, but here’s something to try. Edit the plugin file and search for
plugin_basename. Change all occurrences to bebasename. See if that helps.That did the trick =) Thanks alot!
Just set up your plugin on my site and love it! Should be part of the core WP install IMO. Thanks!
Just wanna say: thank you! This plugin should definitly come in the WP package!
[...] methods. A very useful plugin (that should be on the default package of WordPress) is the Paged Comment Editing, that allows you to see all comments, marked [...]
Hey Brian! Where are you hiding the version with the Next and Previous links that the screen shot sports? The zip or the tar.gz don’t have that in them.
– Anxiously waiting
Geez. Linking to the wrong file! Try again. My apologies.
Thanks for the quick response! The benefit of having to poke around is that I now also have Enhanced Post List installed.
Great Plugin!
Great Plug-in. I use Akismet, BUT wanted to be able to read/view FULL “spam” messages to ensure they were not false positives. This works a treat
Thanks a heap for all your work and ‘tinkering’.
Brilliant!
This is great, really. Do you think you could manage it to work with Akismet also ? This plugin (akismet) shows only 2 if there are 5 spams, only 1 if there is 2 spams etc…
I just wanted to thank you. Very useful plugin.
Do you know if this plugin can work with the new roles in WP2? I want to be able to edit all comments even if written in another author’s posts.
I can’t get this to wordpress 2.0. Does the plug-in need updating or am I missing something?
I really miss using this plug-in it was really useful..
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Brian: When I open my Manage pg., I’m getting the following error msg:
Would you have any sense of what might be wrong & how to fix it? Is it possible that the error might be related to the new WP 2.0 user levels?
Yeah, i was wondering that as well… does this work with WP 2.0?
Everyone who’s complaining they can’t get the plugin to work properly w. wp 2.0, go to: http://www.stilglog.com/wordpress-plugins/enhanced-post-views/
for a port of this plugin to Wp 2.0. After installing make sure you activate 3 plugins containing the title “Enhanced View” on yr wp plugin page.
Good luck.
Are you still working on this plugin? I get this error when I activate it
I am running WordPress 1.5.1.2
What am I doing wrong?
Help me please!
I installed this plugin and everything worked great. But when I delete comments from your comments admin page, the comment count (WP’s “comments_number”) disappears. It doesn’t reset to zero or anything, it just disappears. So now, a hadnful of my posts don’t have a comment count. Please help.
very nice plugin. made life much easier for me. I was wondering if it would be possible to mark unread comments (different background color) for unread comments using cookie tracking or something else?
I know of a plugin called “since last visit”, can this one be combined in a way with the “mass edit mode” of “smart comment” plugin?
any hint would be appreciated.
测试一下
2 EMMA
Look at README
Edit
paged-comments-config-sample.phpto configure, then save the file aspaged-comments-config.php.P.S. Very, very useful plugin, big thanxx
Very useful plugin. But since the comments on my blog is quite rare, I don’t think I’ll give this plugin a go. But then again, thanks for taking the time to develop plugins for wordpress.