SK2 – Moderate Plugin

Current Release: 0.75 (download)

Functional Summary

Enforces the following WordPress administration settings relating to treatment of comments:

  1. “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” (under Options … Discussion)
  2. “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” ( also under Options … Discussion)

The plugin works by running after all the other Spam Karma 2 filters and ensuring that if either of these Discussions options are enabled within WordPress then for comments to which they apply (All comments in the case of (1)) the plugin ensures that the highest karma level a comment can achieve is -1 so that all comments must be moderated before appearing on your site.

Why?

Some people see this as a deficiency in Spam Karma 2, they think that even with the level of protection provided this WordPress option should be observed – now they have the choice. I have also had reports of people receiving a large influx of malicious comments, for example when linked from an online forum, that are from new authors (2) above helps to prevent these appearing on your site when running Spam Karma 2 to protect you against comment spammers.

Future Thoughts

The one main feature of the built-in WordPress comment spam protection system that is not covered by this plugin is integrating the Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist keyword lists. In general if you still really need these on top of all the normal checks that Spam Karma2 does then you need to look at adding some of them to the Spam Karma 2 blacklist – this maybe a daunting task as this uses RegEx’s rather than straight words. However you should find that taking a word from the Comment Moderation list and adding it to the Spam Karma 2 blacklist as a RegEx is as simple as converting Word into /Word/.

Installing

  1. Install Spam Karma 2
  2. Activate Spam Karma 2
  3. Unzip the plugin into the sk2_plugins directory within the SK2 directory in your plugins folder. (e.g. wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_plugins/)
  4. Disable the Captcha Check Treatment plugin in the Spam Karma 2 admin pages – otherwise commenters pushed into moderation by this plugin will be able to rescue themselves 🙁
  5. Relax knowing that all comments that pass Spam Karma 2’s checks will be marked for moderation as required by your WordPress Discussion settings

Bug reports welcome (Please comment below!)

91 thoughts on “SK2 – Moderate Plugin”

  1. Pingback: Peter Westwood » Announcing SK2 - Moderate Plugin

  2. This is what I’ve been looking for! Could you please explain what the settings do? Normal, Strong, Supatrong etc… I’d like to moderate all first timers, but don;t want to be running it too stong, thanks!

  3. westi

    daveb: You want to leave the Setting at Normal for the plugin otherwise it won’t work properly – It relies on reducing the comments karma to -1.0 to put the comment into moderation but not mark it as spam – If you were to use Strong/Supastrong you would find all comments being marked as spam!
    Regarding “I’d like to moderate all first timers,” – The plugin moderates everyone not just first timers, as wordpress would do without Spam Karma 2 installed if you had the “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” enabled in the WordPress admin UI.

  4. I placed this plugin, unzipped, into my plugins folder but its not being seen by WordPress. I have no other plugins activated.

  5. I went and installed your other plugin also. WordPress does not see it.
    When I tried to edit the file by going to the plugin editor and changing the file name to both of your plugins, I get an error “Sorry, that file cannot be edited.” I checked my file permissions but even switch the permissions to 766 did not allow wordpress to even see them.

  6. westi

    Geuis: You need to have Spam Karma 2 installed – This plugin is a plugin for Spam Karma 2 not WordPress directly. I have updated the installation instructions to be clearer.

  7. westi

    Geuis: By other plugin do you mean “SK2 Simple Digest” or “WP Version Checker” – SK2 Simple Digest is included within Spam Karma 2 and the latest version of Spam Karma 2 has the latest version of the Digest plugin included. WP Version checker is as WordPress plugin and should work fine. If you have problems with that please leave a comment on the post for that: http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/archives/2005/06/27/wordpress-version-check/

  8. I installed the two downloads available from this site. Simple Digest and the other one.

    Where do I get the Karma program from?

  10. I successfully installed this plugin, but have disabled it due to the fact that when I tested it out, while it was sending all comments to moderation, after submitting the comment, you’re taken to a page on the site coding.mu containing a HUGE flash demo of someone coding what looks like PHP. I certainly did not set things up that way and when I disable your plugin, the problem goes away. Are you aware of this? I looked at your code, but didn’t see anything related to the problem I’m having.

Comments are closed.