Current Release: 0.75 (download)
Functional Summary
Enforces the following WordPress administration settings relating to treatment of comments:
- “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” (under Options … Discussion)
- “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
- Install Spam Karma 2
- Activate Spam Karma 2
- Unzip the plugin into the
sk2_pluginsdirectory within theSK2directory in your plugins folder. (e.g. wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_plugins/) - 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 🙁
- 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!)
daveb: I was not aware of this problem and I can’t see how my plugin can be the actual cause – the plugin doesn’t contain any code todo redirection or anything like that. In fact the Moderate plugin is hilighting than any of your commenter who were previously going into moderation must have been getting this redirect. It sounds like the code that is doing the redirection which is either WordPress core code / Spam Karma 2 code (I am not sure which) is not working correctly.
It is therefore probably best to try the following tests:
Commenting with SK2 disabled completely and the “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” option enabled – where do you get redirected then?
Re-enabling SK2 and the Moderate plugin and trying again to check that it is repeatable
If it still happens then I would suggesting searching through all the files in your WordPress install for “coding.mu” (It may be possible that someone got into your blog via on of the security vulnerabilities in WordPress versions prior to 1.5.1.3 and edited one of the files.)
Well, some people at the WP support forum figured it out. You might be interested in knowing this, so here’s the URL to the thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/38610
In short, the problem lies with SK2 and using your plugin triggered the error, however, it is entirely fixable by disabling the “Captcha” plugin that comes bundled in SK2. I now have no problems and your plugin does exactly what I needed it to do. Cheers!
Thats ok daveb!
I am westi on the forums 😉
Pingback: Peter Westwood » SK2 - Moderate Plugin Update
I wanted to express my gratitude to Peter for taking this plugin on after I wrote to Dr. Dave’s blog with my tale of woe about periodic blog comment attacks by various unhappy individuals which I could not halt since SK2 disabled WP’s comment moderation settings.
This plugin should go a LONG way toward ending such comment abuse since almost all of my comment trolls are first timers & will be stopped dead in their tracks by Peter’s plugin.
Pingback: Tikun Olam-תקון עול×: Make the World a Better Place » Peter Westwood’s Spam Karma 2 Comment Moderation Plugin
A few comments on the plugin in case anyone has any ideas on how to address them; when I disabled Captcha Check as Peter suggested, then I don’t seem able to convert an SK moderated comment into spam; when I reenable Captcha Check then I can do this;
Also, after installing the file in the folder Peter specified, my first comment, from a first time commenter, wasn’t moderated and was published instead;
Has anyone noticed any of these behaviors in your own installations
Richard: Can you email me the sk2 report for the comment that went straight through. If you have Captcha enabled the commenter will have been offered that and will have been able to rescue themselves from moderations – This is why is must be disabled for sk2-moderate to be effective. As for the issue with going from moderated to spam I’m not sure what is going on but will have a look and see if I can reproduce the issue.
I deleted that comment. Would SK2 still have it listed? If not, then I’ll wait till the next new comment goes through & be sure to get the sk2 rpt. By “sk2 report” do you mean the data in the SK2 log or from the “Recent Spam Harvest” screen? I assume the latter…
Captcha Check is now disabled & I believe it was as well when this comment was posted. In any case, the only time I’ll enable Captcha Check is when I have to convert an SK2-moderated comment to spam status. After that, I disable Captcha Check again.
By sk2 report I do mean the data from the “Recent Spam Harvest” screen for a the comment – or it might be easier to wait for the next digest email (If you let the old spam hand around long enough for it) and send me the relavent section of that. It also details the same information as is displayed on the “Recent Spam Harvest” screen.