WordPress plugin updated: Comment E-Mail Verification (0.3)

March 9, 2010 in E-Mail, WordPress Plugins | 4 comments

The newest version (0.3) of my Comment E-Mail Verification plugin now supports SMTP as an alternative method to send mail.

Download it directly from the wordpress.org plugin directory

Thanks to Mark for testing and feedback

It is also the first version to come with a German translation.

If you would like to help by translating this plugin to another language please download the plugin, grab the .pot file, create .po and .mo files and e-mail them to me. (You will be credited.) If this was all gibberish to you you can still help: please start by reading Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes – Of course you may contact me at anytime to find out whether anyone else has announced or sent to me a translation to that language already. This will avoid any unnecessary efforts on your side.

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  1. JP on January 4, 2011 at 3:26 pm

    “If a comment is held for moderation an email message is sent to the comment author with a link to verify the comment author’s email address.”

    What about if the comment is held for moderation because it contains links or flagged keywords, but is posted by a previously approved commenter?

    They’ve already posted a comment, so they’ve already verified their email, but their comment is being held for moderation by WordPress. They should not get a verify email request. Will they get the verify email anyway?

  2. Martin Lormes on January 5, 2011 at 11:37 am

    The E-mail goes out each and every time a comment is held for moderation, regardless of the reason.

    I would have to double check but I don’t think WordPress would hold the comment for moderation in the scenario you described. It would either be considered spam (keywords) or allowed (links would be ignored). I am afc (posting this from a mobile device) and can’t perform the check myself now, so if you do, please share your findings, or wait until I find the time to follow up!

  3. JP on January 21, 2011 at 6:53 pm

    Hey Martin, thanks for following up.

    Yes I have observed this behavior — previously approved commenters have had their comments held in moderation due to links.

    In the Discussion section of WordPress settings, you can flag certain keywords that will tell WordPress to put the comment into moderation, not necessarily marking it as spam. The Discussion section also lets you hold a comment for moderation if it contains links. It doesn’t mark the comment as spam.

    I have comments set up to auto-approve from previously approved commenters. This way I don’t have to babysit comments from repeat commenters, since it is from someone I already know.

    But I also set WordPress to hold comments if they contain links. If someone posts a link in a comment, I want to see it first before publishing the comment.

    So when a comment from a previously approved commenter comes in with a link, it is not sent to the spam queue, it is held for moderation.

    So in either of these situations (comment held for flagged keywords or containing links), if I set up WordPress this way, your plugin will send out the email anyway.

    I imagine there must be some way to accomodate this situation — check the comment author email in the DB for a previously approved comment before sending the email?

  4. Martin Lormes on January 24, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    JP: Thanks for your detailed explanation. I can see how my plugin “hurts” you in 2 ways here: a) you don’t want the E-mail to go out a second time for previously confirmed addresses and b) you don’t necessarily want comments “auto-approved” by the users themselves when they contain links.

    Unfortunately neither of these issues can be addressed by a minor update of the plugin. For one because the API just doesn’t provide an interface to the reason why a comment is held for moderation. Secondly it’s expensive (to almost impossible) to tell whether an E-mail address in the comments table has already been verified by a user through my plugin.

    To be honest: I don’t think I’ll update my plugin here unless somebody is willing to pay for half a day of work or so. This goes way beyond what I have needed in any of my projects so far. If you like you can always edit it yourself, though, and if you send me your version I might as well add it to my version and give you heaps of credit on my blogs and in the readme, i.e. on wordpress.org

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