WordPress comment management bug?

I’ve recently become aware of an issue with managing comments in WordPress 2.5. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s simply a poorly implemented “feature”, but I’m going to call it a bug.

When you go to the administration area within WP, and you click on the “Comments” tab at the top, you are given three options. You can “Show All Comments”, show those comments that are “Awaiting Moderation” or show those comments that have been “Approved”.

Wordpress check allGenerally, I click on the “Awaiting Moderation” tab and start viewing all of the comments that have yet to be approved. I then click on the checkbox that checks all of the checkboxes on the page.

Approve commentFrom there, I scroll down the page to find any comments that might not be spam. If I think they’re okay, I’ve been pressing the “Approve” link on the right side of the comment, which invokes an AJAX command to approve the comment.

Mark all as spamThen, when I get to the end of the list, I scroll back up to the top and press the “Mark as Spam” link at the top to mark all of the comments that are still shown as “spam” comments.

I’ve found a major problem with this method, however.

For some reason, WP seems to keep the IDs for the “approved” comments in the list of “selected” comments. Therefore, when you press the “Mark as Spam” button, it marks those comments that you already approved as spam, too.

My advice – if you use a method similar to mine, I would recommend simply unchecking the comments that are not spam, then go back and approve them separately.

To anyone that left a legitimate comment on this blog, I apologize if your comment got deleted. There were a handful of comments that were mistakenly marked as spam because of this “bug” before I discovered the problem.

2 Responses

  • admin

    interesting find!

  • Else

    I think you are too pessimistic when saying about “unchecking the comments that are not spam”. =)