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. Hmm. How come I learned more about what Spam Karma does on your single page than I did on the Spam Karma web pages altogether? Hmm.

    Thanks, Peter, for creating this module. If you create one that has an easier way to blacklist specific words, please let me know.

  2. Peter can correct me if I’m wrong, but his plugin is not precisely Spam Karma 2 but a modification of it. I agree that Peter does explain things very nicely & some plugin authors can’t manage to do this important function.

    But Peter’s describing above his plugin for forcing first time comments into moderation. Spam Karma w/o Peter’s plugin will NOT force first time comments into moderation. So there’s the difference. Hope this makes sense.

  3. Richard, I think what Nancy is saying is that the post above explains the reason why the WordPress options that this plugin enforces much better than zedrdave does on his own site.

    To be fair Spam Karma itself is designed as a replacement for the built in moderation functionality rather than an addition.

    Dave chose to leave these features out because in general the other filters than Spam Karma runs are much better at picking out spam and the aim of Spam Karma is to provide the blog author with excellent spam protection for minimum time spent. This can be invaluable if you are inundated with a large spam run.

  4. I have placed email addresses in the Comment Blacklist yet the comments get through. Also I have users flagged at User Level 0 yet they still are allowed to post. My current settings are: General settings normal User Level – Strength Supastrong and Blacklist Strength Supastrong. Spam Karma II is installed. I am just the moderator of the site, so I cannot send any logs. Any suggestions that I can send my webhead?

  5. Walt: From you comments I assume your problem is that you would like all comments to go through moderation on your site?

    If so you could get you webhead to install the moderate plugin and then ensure that the WordPress option “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” (under Options > Discussion) is enabled. This will then force all comments into moderation.

    To understand why the comments are getting through the only logs I would need to see are the SK2 report on the comment which would be contained within the digest emails (which are sent to the admin user).

  6. Thanks for the reply Westi. We do not want to send all comments to moderation. If I understand user level permissions correctly, Level 0 can view their and edit their profile and read the comments. At level 1 they are allowed to post. When I move a level 1 to level 0 the level 0 permission does not seem to hold.

    As I understand Comment Blacklist anything, a word, an email addy, or ip addresss placed here, if a User includes anything in their comment that is listed in comment blacklist, that comment is “NUKED” no notification. I have a couple guys that occasionally want to drop the F-bomb into the comments and that particular words is not blocked even though I have it listed in the “comment blacklist”.

    Hope this helps. Lord no I do not want all the comments to go to moderation (LOL). I really do appreciate the help and reply. LMK if the logs you mentioned are still what you need and I will get them from my web guru.
    Best Regards
    Walt

  7. Walt, from your talk of User Levels I assume you are using 1.5. The User Levels in 1.5 do not affect the ability to post comments as far as I know. The main options that affects this in in the General Options panel “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” which would then require at least level 0 to comment and not allow random commenters.

    As you are using Spam Karma 2 the WordPress Comment Blacklist is not used. The checks that Spam Karma uses are much more thorough that these are are an alternative to them.

    If you want to restrict comment posting to level 1 users then you would need an additional Spam Karma plugin to enforce this.

    It would be simple to write and if you want I could knock one up for you.

  8. Greetings Westi and thanks for your patience. I know we are using Spam Karma II let me check with Bill, my webmaster and make sure we are using WP 2.0 or confirm what we have on board. Ideally we would like the ability to drop a person to Level O and not worry about that user posting till we restore them to Level 1. As I posted above if we drop a user to level 0 they are still able to comment.

    Best regards
    Walt

  9. Walt: Looking at you site at the moment it looks like you are using WordPress 1.5. I have hacked together a Spam Karma 2 plugin which will force all comments by a users with a user level lower than a specific number into moderation which will achieve what you want.

    However because of the new capabilities and roles in WordPress 2.0 this plugin won’t work with WordPress 2.0.

    I think I have a idea how I can add support for WordPress 2.0 but it will take me a bit more time to test.

    Let me know which version of WordPress you require compatibility with and I’ll release the new plugin soon 🙂

  10. Peter: I had no idea that your plugin wasn’t compatible w. WP 2.0. Actually, SK2 HAS been sending most new comments into moderation (I upgraded to 2.0 a month ago or so). I’m unclear why it would still be forcing most first timers into moderation even though it’s not compatible.

    I am very intersted in seeing if you can get it fully compatible with 2.0.

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