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"Where the hell are my comments?""Where the hell are my comments?"

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 againbut 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.

Digg!

41 Responses to “"Where the hell are my comments?"”

  1. 1

    Blogging Pro Says:

    WordPress Plugin: Paged Comment Editing

    Paged Comment Editing plugin overhauls the stock comment editing interface to provide the following capabilities:

    Page through all of your comments in the comment administration interface. The stock interface is limited to displaying the 20 most...
    
  2. 2

    a man without letters Says:

    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 …

  3. 3

    Thor Says:

    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!

  4. 4

    glo Says:

    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 … ;)

  5. 5

    Mark Says:

    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.

  6. 6

    Tempus Fugit | TxFx.net Says:

    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…

  7. 7

    p e r l w o r l d » Blog Archive » Comment Plugin Says:

    […] Comment Plugin coldforged has gone and created a nice improvement for the comment moderation admin page. It seems a slight oversight in the […]

  8. 8

    ColdForged Says:

    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!

    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 :) .

    where is that comment preview plugin?

    Gah! I still have to write that up. Don’t give up hope!

    This is exactly what is going to be needed when work starts on Spam Karma 2.0

    Awesome, Mark, I’m glad I could provide something to help the cause. Good luck with that next version!

  9. 9

    Johnny Gulag Says:

    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 :D

    Anywho really cool plug-in just what I have been wanting, an easier way to view all the comments in my database.

    Thanks

  10. 10

    ColdForged Says:

    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

    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.

  11. 11

    Ron Says:

    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?

  12. 12

    ColdForged Says:

    So if you deactivate the plugin and go to that page your comments show up?

  13. 13

    Ron Says:

    Yes

  14. 14

    TBBle Says:

    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.

  15. 15

    ensellitis Says:

    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 370

    I am using 1.5-gamma, is that causing this problem?

  16. 16

    ensellitis Says:

    And how did you do that spam prevention enter a word thingy?? I like that =)

  17. 17

    ColdForged Says:

    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 be basename. See if that helps.

  18. 18

    ensellitis Says:

    That did the trick =) Thanks alot!

  19. 19

    Rob Says:

    Just set up your plugin on my site and love it! Should be part of the core WP install IMO. Thanks!

  20. 20

    Vitor Says:

    Just wanna say: thank you!
    This plugin should definitly come in the WP package!

  21. 21

    vitor azevedo.com » Blog Archive » Problems… Not anymore Says:

    […] 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 […]

  22. 22

    Kimmo Says:

    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 :-)

  23. 23

    ColdForged Says:

    Geez. Linking to the wrong file! Try again. My apologies.

  24. 24

    Kimmo Says:

    Thanks for the quick response! The benefit of having to poke around is that I now also have Enhanced Post List installed.

  25. 25

    Jesse Says:

    Great Plugin!

  26. 26

    Tack Says:

    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’.

  27. 27

    Jo Says:

    Brilliant!

  28. 28

    Mark C. Says:

    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…

  29. 29

    Daniel Gutierrez Says:

    I just wanted to thank you. Very useful plugin.

  30. 30

    Lawrence Says:

    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.

  31. 31

    Emma Says:

    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..

  32. 32

    Online casino Says:

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  33. 33

    Richard Silverstein Says:

    Brian: When I open my Manage pg., I’m getting the following error msg:

    WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘user_level’ in ‘where clause’]
    SELECT * FROM wp152_users WHERE user_level > 0 ORDER BY user_nickname

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/richard2/domains/richardsilverstein.com/public_html/tikun_olam/wp-content/plugins/enhanced-views.php on line 127

    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?

  34. 34

    Jeremy Says:

    Yeah, i was wondering that as well… does this work with WP 2.0?

  35. 35

    Richard Silverstein Says:

    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.

  36. 36

    Xnxx Says:

    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!

  37. 37

    Spectorbrain Says:

    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.

  38. 38

    kishmish Says:

    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.

  39. 39

    地方 Says:

    Emma said:

    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..

    测试一下

  40. 40

    Sergey Says:

    2 EMMA

    Look at README

    1. Edit paged-comments-config-sample.php to configure, then save the file as paged-comments-config.php.

      P.S. Very, very useful plugin, big thanxx

  41. 41

    Faizi Says:

    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.

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    Someone Says: