Comment E-Mail Verification

Comment E-Mail Verification is a WordPress Plugin. It sends an e-mail message to the comment author when a comment is held for moderation. The e-mail message contains a link to verify the comment author’s e-mail address. When the comment author clicks on that link the comment gets approved immediately. This makes discussions more lively as users don’t have to wait for the blog admin to approve the comment.

This plugin is in still in early development. The version number is 0.3

Please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-email-verify/ to download and test it!

A list of shortcodes for the message template is available here.

  1. Thank you very much…

  2. I tested version 0.2 of this plug-in on WordPress 2.9.2, and no email is sent when I create a comment. The comment appears in the moderation queue, and I get the notification with the following message:

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.
    If you verify your address your comment will be approved immediately. Instructions have been sent to you by e-mail.

    But no email was sent. I am using the default settings for the plug-in. I have a wordpress email address for my domain name. Is there something else I have to do to send the email to the commenter?

  3. Mark: could you post the URL to your blog? I tried guessing it from your mail address but must have hit the wrong one.

    Is e-mail delivery from your blog working in general? I.e. do you get moderation messages to the admin e-mail address? Do post authors receive notification messages when there are new comments on their posts? If not, then this plugin will probably not work either. You may be able to get it to work, though… Please bear with me while I am still working on this page:

    http://ten-fingers-and-a-brain.com/wordpress-plugins/comment-email-verify/troubleshooting/

    Please note that the verification link is sent to the mail address specified by the comment author, not to the blog admin.

  4. Here’s my blog URL:

    http://www.meandmark.com/blog

    I did get moderation messages sent to my admin email address, but I turned them off because I was getting too many spam messages. I do get emails when someone legit (has had one comment approved) comments on my posts.

    The problem I am having is no email is sent to the comment author’s email address. As a test, I posted a comment on one of my posts using a phony name and my Yahoo email address. I signed on to my Yahoo account to check for the verification email, but there was no email.

    If you go to my blog URL, I have a contact link where you can send me an email if you would prefer to discuss this further via email.

  5. Yahoo will be covered on my troubleshooting page… I think they’re (part of) the reason this didn’t work.

    Please try this again with a different address! Your regular e-mail address (the one you have the notifications sent to) should be just fine if you use a phony name! (WordPress auto-approves a comment only if both the e-mail address and name match, so the phony name should put you in the right position.)

    Please also note that no verification link will be sent if Akismet (or sk2 or any plugin in that league) catches the comment and puts it in the spam queue.

    You may also try posting a comment using my address (I will e-mail it to you) with the plugin turned on, so I can check my messages and/or mail server logs and see what can be done…

    Thanks for your feedback by the way, as this will probably help me improve this plugin further.

  6. If you provide the option to delete comments whose email addresses were not verified. That would stop commentators who use fake ids, without waiting for the admin to moderate comments, easier house keeping I’d say!

  7. Shabayek: I will take that into consideration.
    I think this would need a timeframe during which commentators can verify their comments. What (default) timeframe would you suggest?

  8. Hi

    I was wondering if your plugin works along with Comments with OpenId. Also once a comment form a commentator was approved is there any confirmation email for next comments from that same commentator?

    Thank you R

  9. Another excellent plugin. Well done. I am curious – have you considered writing plugins for profit or are you committed to OS? Do you make much in donations?

  10. Radek: sorry for not replying any sooner.

    I have not tested this with/against the OpenId plugin.

    Whether or not there is a confirmation message depends on the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” option of WordPress. Turn it on and there will be only one confirmation message. Turn it off and there will be a confirmation message for every comment.

    Michael: I made zip in donations so far. I do write software for profit. I actually have so much to do that I haven’t felt a need to do any serious marketing here. I do ask all client whether it’s OK to open-source the generic portions of the project. My queue of unpublished code is quite long, but I have so much to do… you get the idea.

  11. Hi Martin, I think Comment E-mail Verification looks like a very good plugin, but unfortunately WordPress 3.0 seems to break its functionality. Would you please consider updating it for WP 3.0?

    Thank you!