Moderation queue is not working properly
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I have set in Discussion Settings ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’ and no other moderation settings (blog is at WordPress.com). However, comments from some (not all) authors will always go to the moderation queue even though they certainly have previously accepted comment.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Can you please point me to a specific comment on your site where this has happened? This likely has to do with how the person submitted their comment, causing our system to still see them as a new visitor to the site even though they’ve commented before. If I can see a comment like that it might give some more information.
If this is repeatedly happening to a specific commenter, can you please also give the name under which that user is commenting?
Also please let us know the next time this happens, without manually approving the comment.
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Thank you for your response kokkieh! At the time of writing this I have 14 new comments in the moderation queue from several commenters, all of whom have dozens of previously approved comments. At the same time several comments have been posted normally from other commenters, so this feels like commenter-specific problem: some commenters always gets into moderation whereas others pass through as they should. Let me know when I can approve the comments in the queue so people don’t feel I have banned them!
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Okay. I see these are all “anonymous” commenters, in the sense that aside from the name they provided there is no other identifying info – they’re not logged into a WordPress.com account or any of the social media accounts that can be used for commenting, and you don’t require commenters on your site to provide an email address, so there’s no data point we can log in the site database to identify and “whitelist” the particular commenter.
The name is not a reliable identifier in this case, as it’s not unique – I can open your site in an incognito browser tab and comment as “Doug H”, and our system will have no way of knowing I’m not the same Doug H that regularly comments on your site. We don’t use the IP address as identifier in this regard, as IPs are not unique – several people could potentially visit your site from the same IP over time, and the same person could access your site from different IPs in a single day as they change between devices, networks, VPNs, etc.
So there’s not really any way to prevent those comments from going into moderation first save completely disabling moderation.
Unrelated, but I noticed you have several IPs added to the comment blacklist. As a rule we don’t recommend that as it could end up blocking more than just the people you are intending to block – see my comment above about IPs not being unique.
As you don’t require emails I understand you can’t use that instead. But looking at the comments currently in your Trash folder quite a few seem like they’re just good old spam. For comments you consider spam, please don’t trash them or blacklist the IPs (which will just auto-trash them), but mark them as spam instead. That way you help train our spam filter to automatically spam comments like that instead, so you no longer have to blacklist or manually trash them.
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Thank you for the information kokkieh! I understand the situation now. I have not required email-address from commenters so as to make commenting easy. I could now change that but there is one major obstacle: I have written instructions into the comment prompt and now I cannot change that any more (see discussion here). Would it be possible for you to reset my comment prompt entirely so that it will not contain any text at all? I could then write the new instructions to the blog text itself.
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Sure. The comment prompt cannot be completely blank, but I’ve reset it to the default “Leave a reply” text.
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