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.
Lawrence Says:February 4th, 2006 at 12:06 am
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.
Daniel Gutierrez Says:January 11th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I just wanted to thank you. Very useful plugin.
Mark C. Says:January 10th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
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…
Jo Says:January 1st, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Brilliant!
Tack Says:November 12th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
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’.
Jesse Says:October 24th, 2005 at 7:02 am
Great Plugin!
Kimmo Says:April 24th, 2005 at 11:48 am
Thanks for the quick response! The benefit of having to poke around is that I now also have Enhanced Post List installed.
ColdForged Says:April 23rd, 2005 at 9:37 pm
Geez. Linking to the wrong file! Try again. My apologies.
Kimmo Says:April 23rd, 2005 at 8:41 pm
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
vitor azevedo.com » Blog Archive » Problems… Not anymore Says:April 23rd, 2005 at 10:46 am
[…] 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 […]