Since enabling comment moderation on the Tavern, I’ve discovered that WordPress does not notify commenters when their comments are approved.
On the Tavern, I’m using the Comment Approved plugin by Niels van Renselaar. It allows me to create a custom notification message that is sent when a comment is approved. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s working. Please let me know if you’ve received any comment approval emails from the Tavern.
I strongly believe this feature should be in core. I’ve started the process by creating a feature request ticket on WordPress trac. Let’s discuss the pros and cons or why you think it shouldn’t be in core. Please give me your feedback in the comments or within the ticket.
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The plugin is not working for you because you’re using the Jetpack comment form.
The Comment Approved plugin adds a checkbox to the normal comment form, which says “Notify me by email when my comment gets approved”. This checkbox does not appear on the Jetpack form, because the Jetpack form replaces the normal comment form. So, that setting is never checked for anybody, so nobody gets a notification.
You can use Jetpack comments, or plugins that expect you to be using normal comments. Not both.
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Oh dear, the lack of being able to extend Jetpack comments strikes again.
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If a plugin (or core) simply notified the user without asking for the opt-in, it’d work. In this case, everything would work fine except the lack of meta to indicate that you should notify that particular commenter.
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I suppose that is something worth discussing, whether the commenter should opt-in to receive a notification or whether it should happen automatically.
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In some countries I believe opt-in is a requirement.
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@Armin Grewe And if any of those countries had any form of legal jurisdiction over Jeff and his blog, then that would be a point to be concerned about. However, since this is unlikely to be the case, then I think it’s really rather a moral question as opposed to a legal one.
The opt-in checkbox is certainly worth considering, however, it’s also worth looking at the data itself. I comment here using my WordPress.com account. Does the email field even get filled in properly on my comments, Jeff? Or does it fill it in with some wp.com data? Will emails even work directly?
In the long run, I’d ditch the Jetpack comments system. Mainly because it’s a source of too many problems, but also because, well, I kinda sorta hate it. It’s annoying and interferes with too many things. It’s fine for WordPress.com blogs, but on .org ones, it’s intrusive and difficult to work with. Not their fault, I see why they did it the way it has been done, but it’s still annoying and painful.
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@Otto,
“And if any of those countries had any form of legal jurisdiction over Jeff and his blog, then that would be a point to be concerned about.”
Actually, they do. You might think that’s silly but, to use your own words, your view is “really rather a moral question as opposed to a legal one.”
Of course, those countries are extremely unlikely to try to enforce that power, but that’s a whole different thing from saying they don’t have jurisdiction.
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You know me, man. Hit me up via email and I’ll create something for you for this. Should not be hard. ;)
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Apparently the plugin checks for the presence of “notify_me” comment meta entry which the author has to check to actually receive the notification. I doesn’t work because the Jetpack comment form doesn’t respect the
comment_form_default_fieldsfilter (because it’s actually an iframe) and the checkbox is not visible when writing the comment.Permalink
https://wordpress.org/plugins/notify-users-e-mail/ Not Help you?
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That’s to notify people when a post is published. What I want is entirely different and relates to comments.
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Interesting idea, Jeff. We hadn’t thought of this for Postmatic. It may very well show up in 1.5 later this month.
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I do not receive any notification everytime my comment is approved but that is not important as far as I am concerned for as long as I am notified of new blog post via the jetpack plugin/wordpress.com.
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Do you always moderate all comments or just the first comment?
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I moderate every comment!
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Jeff, send me a message :). I’m happy to help you out to get it working. I’m not sure how the Jetpack comments are working but will be happy to figure it out!
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I’ve not got a strong opinion on this one, but here’s something else you can’t do in core that strikes me as something that ought to be there: the ability to lock a user’s account so that they can’t login.
With vanilla core, you can delete an account, but that requires you to either delete or re-assign content (both of which can be problematic – what if you want content to remain and be credited to the real author?). But, you can’t keep an account and prevent login without a snippet or plugin.
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It is actually very simple, change both email address and password.
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All good issues mentioned above (i.e user must consent to receive emails from you). This could be done with an auto-checked box, but that opens another caveat.
WordPress by default allows you to moderate the first comment, but then auto-approve the later ones unless it catches a filter (i.e too many links or word blacklist etc).
So do you keep showing the checkbox to those users? Or do you setup some kind of cookie for tracking purposes? (ok that will open a new set of problems which can be discussed in a ticket itself).
Let’s say that you do get this in core, the other big problem is that most hosting environments aren’t suitable for “reliable” email delivery. It’s too often that user registration emails / password reset emails go in spam folder unless you use a SMTP plugin and run emails through Google Apps or Mandrill.
TBH: I think the WP comment system in general could use some love :)
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I was searching for the same functionality for my own website, and I ended up using this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/comment-email-reply/ I had to change the code a bit for my own use, but it works like a charm!
It sends an email when you manually approve it, that’s all. You can change the text of the email by adding a translation file.
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If you are going to extend some code to fix this – how about adding a checkbox for the admin to send a notice that says something like “you comment was not approved – in fact it was derezzed with extreme prejudice due to violations of our new comment content policy” –
(not doing emoji – please read that with a joking laughing voice, then switch to one of those movie quotes with a military tone for the extreme prejudice part, then back to totally kidding voice)
would also be nice to be able to forward to the text of the comment back to the commenters – if they spent 50 minutes writing something, it might be nice to give them their text back – giving an option to review it, and consider changing a word or two that may have been considered too controversial – thus giving an option to still post important info and keeping the comment in line with whatever policy said site may have… extra cool if possible to highlight the words that causing the concern..
so a third checkbox option under “Notify me of new comments via email” –
notify me if my comment is approved for public display or disapproved by the moderation team”
I know it’s a pain, with some comments on one of my sites I edit things when personally identifiable info or something similar is included.. and I add ** edited by admin to remove blah blah ** – it’s fun when you moderate every comment that comes through, would love to see more options / better tools for comment admins.
* especially if those tools were not hooked into jetpack or other third party services that we’d never use :))
Wish I could help with this – I’m now 20% through my course on php – maybe one day.