Comment Held in Moderation

mayo.mick

I was asked to have a look at a website (wordpress), with the intention of sprucing things up, change theme etc. There is a small number of plugins, twitter, back up to dropbox, social media icons, not much else. Wordpress core hadn't been updated for a long time, think it was on 3.9! Theme as well was not up to date, (owner was afraid to do any updates in case it broke the site).

Anyway, did all the updates, core, theme and any plugin updates. Problem now is every comment is being held in moderation (fairly high traffic & comments). It was set as usual, new first comment held in moderation. Standard set up, any links posted are held. Most of the posters are previously approved, but since this update they are all being held now in moderation.

Some have gravatars enabled, some have the website field filled out when posting. Tried posting with, without links, website filled etc. I have switched off the comment moderation for new posters and it works as usual, but the site owner doesn't want this, wants to moderate new posters (naturally).

Has anyone come across this before? Can't find anything similar in the wordpress support forum.

daymobrew

It might be worth going to the Settings/Discussion page and clicking "Save Changes" on the off-chance that some settings do not have the appropriate values (unlikely but no harm).

Do all the moderation related settings look okay on that page?

mayo.mick

daymobrew wrote: »

It might be worth going to the Settings/Discussion page and clicking "Save Changes" on the off-chance that some settings do not have the appropriate values (unlikely but no harm).

Do all the moderation related settings look okay on that page?

Yeah, everything else is fine. There are a number of posters in the moderation box and a few blacklisted, email and IP address though. I did check those ip's and names just in case. I had changed the setting so any comment could be posted, then changed it back to new poster to be approved. Everything fine when switched off but when switched back the problem arises again.

The owner was just telling me its only some posters who are being held, these would be long time posters (as in a few years). I'm just wondering if it was the big jump in the update of the core wordpress from 3.9... to 4.7.1? I haven't tried a reinstall of wordpress core.

daymobrew

mayo.mick wrote: »

I'm just wondering if it was the big jump in the update of the core wordpress from 3.9... to 4.7.1? I haven't tried a reinstall of wordpress core.

How did you do the upgrade? Via Dashboard/Upgrade? If so the upgrade code has a list of changes to make for each version (files to remove, database tables to update).

My next step would be to get into the code to find out where the decision to moderate is made and then write code to access this data to see what is different between comments that pass the check and those that don't - basically you'd write code that use add_action() or add_filter() to get access to the relevant variables.

daymobrew

If you go the 'write some code route', I think that you will need to look at the 'check_comment()' function. It only has 2 apply_filters() calls for you to hook into so that's not great, but worth a try.

I blogged about debugging with WordPress so that might help you.