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.
Vitor Says:April 23rd, 2005 at 10:31 am
Just wanna say: thank you!
This plugin should definitly come in the WP package!
Rob Says:March 21st, 2005 at 3:11 pm
Just set up your plugin on my site and love it! Should be part of the core WP install IMO. Thanks!
ensellitis Says:March 14th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
That did the trick =) Thanks alot!
ColdForged Says:March 14th, 2005 at 8:35 am
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.
ensellitis Says:March 12th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
And how did you do that spam prevention enter a word thingy?? I like that =)
ensellitis Says:March 12th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
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?
TBBle Says:March 4th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
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.
Ron Says:March 4th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
Yes
ColdForged Says:March 4th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
So if you deactivate the plugin and go to that page your comments show up?
Ron Says:March 4th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
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?