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. I’m a little confused & sorry if anything I wrote above contributed to this. I was talking above about 2 separate comments: One was a SK2-moderated spam comment which I couldn’t convert into spam using SK2’s “confirm all moderated as spam” setting while Captcha Check was disabled. Are you saying you’d like to see the sk2 rpt. for this comment? If so, that still remains in the log & I can provide that SK2 rpt. to you right now.

    The 2nd comment was a first-time comment published (& not forced into moderation as it should have been) after I installed SK2 Moderate plugin. I thought that your last comment suggested that I send you the rpt. on this comment using the SK2 digest e mail notification. If that is what you meant, since it wasn’t flagged as spam I don’t believe it’ll appear in the digest e mail. That’s right isn’t it?

  2. The 2nd comment was a first-time comment published (& not forced into moderation as it should have been) after I installed SK2 Moderate plugin. I thought that your last comment suggested that I send you the rpt. on this comment using the SK2 digest e mail notification. If that is what you meant, since it wasn’t flagged as spam I don’t believe it’ll appear in the digest e mail. That’s right isn’t it?

    Yes this is the comment I would like to see the report for. As it originally wasn’t flagged as Spam it wouldn’t normally appear in the digest report.

    However if you mark the comment as Spam using the “moderate Comments” button on the “Approved Comments” tab it should appear in the “Recent Spams” tab and will then be included in the next digest email.

  3. I unfortunately deleted that comment & didn’t convert it into spam using SK2 so it won’t appear in the digest I’m afraid. But I’ll do this to the next first-time comment that that gets published w/o going to moderation.

    Or perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me by publishing a test comment in my blog http://www.richardsilverstein.com/ . If it gets published immediately, do you want me to convert it to spam & send you the Spam Harvest rpt.?

  4. Richard: Ok don’t worry about the old comment. I would try a test comment on your blog but unfortunately I’m now at work and can’t access your site it seems to be on the vast list of websites that we are not allowed to access – Which includes most blogs :-(.

    You could run a test yourself though. If you logout from WordPress and the write a comment on one of your posts with what you know is a unique email address @ website address – For Example spam-test@spam-test.dom and www.spam-test.dom and see what happen to that comment.

  5. Peter: I followed yr. advice & did my own test comment. It did publish immediately & wasn’t sent to moderation. This is what the Approved Comments screen listed for the comment:

    6.55

    5.55: 1 whitelist match. (127 = 24.19.22.142 [x1])
    0.5: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
    0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL”)

    Possibly it’s picking up my IP as one that’s on SK2’s IP Whitelist & been previously approved for commenting. So maybe a self test won’t work & I need the comment coming fr. an IP that’s never commented before?

  6. Richard: That looks strange. If the email address was new then the plugin should have forced the comment into moderation. I’ll email you a debug version of the plugin to try.

  7. Peter: Pls. accept my sincere apologies…I made the stupidest mistake & feel so embarrassed! I didn’t follow your installation instructions carefully enough & installed the file in the SK2 folder, not the SK2 Plugins folder as you specified. After figuring out my mistake & correcting it the plugin works precisely as it’s supposed to.

    Again, my apologies…& thanks again for a great plugin.

  8. Peter: Just wanted to let you know that your plugin caught my first troll (trying to say my blog about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict abetted those who wished to give a “helping hand to terrorism and [to those who wished] the death of more jews”). I was delighted that thanks to you, SK2 caught this first time comment & gave me a chance to toss it in the garbage where it belongs.

    You just can’t imagine how frustrated I used to be at Typepad, & even WP before you developed this, at seeing such comments publish immediately & then have to decide what I wanted to do w. them. It’s so much cleaner & simpler when you have the option of deciding for yourself before they’re out there in public view.

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