Comment Moderation Feed WP Plugin

About a week ago Lorelle asked what new features users want for the comment panel in WordPress. One of the commenters suggested a RSS feed of comments held for moderation. That seemed like a fun little idea, so (after procrastinating and playing Spore for several days straight) I went ahead and implemented it.

Overview

Comment Moderation Feed is a small WordPress plugin that creates a RSS 2.0 feed of comments awaiting moderation on your blog. The feeds is similar to other comment feeds offered by WP, but it also includes additional information about the comment author (like email and IP address) and quick links that let you approve, mark as spam or delete a comment.

After installing the plugin you can obtain the feed either by clicking the “Feed” link near the plugin’s Deactivate & Edit links on the Plugins tab, or by using your browser’s feed autodiscovery function on the Comments -> Awaiting Moderation page.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the appearance of the feed – e.g. where various elements/links should go and their formatting – feel free to let me know. The current entry structure feels a bit clunky to me, but I couldn’t think of anything better at the time.

Download

comment-moderation-feed.zip (3 KB)
I have only tested the plugin with WP 2.6.1 but I’m fairly certain it will work with versions 2.3.0 and up.

Security

The RSS feed contains information that is not available to simple mortals visitors – the IP address and email of your commenters. This means you probably shouldn’t give away the feed’s URL to untrusted entities. The URL contains a randomized key that will is unique to your blog (but fear not – the key can’t be used to access the blog or decode your password).

On a philosophical note, the plugin employs security-by-obscurity which is not The Right WayTM. However, I think the security risk here is very minor.

Offtopic : Spore is great, but the space age gets very frustrating when a Class 5 warrior empire keeps harassing my colonies. I think eventually I’ll be forced to conquer them. I’m quite warlike, too 😛

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12 Responses to “Comment Moderation Feed WP Plugin”

  1. Graham King says:

    I had to switch off the FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin to get this to work, otherwise that plugin redirects this feed to the standard posts feed.

  2. Paul Butcher says:

    Hey, this is exactly what I’m looking for 🙂

    Unfortunately I get the following when I try to activate it:

    Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /home/paulb/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/comment-moderation-feed/comment-moderation-feed.php on line 226

    I’m using WordPress 2.7.1. Any idea what might be up?

  3. White Shadow says:

    What’s your PHP version? The plugin should work with both PHP 4 and PHP 5, but I’ve only tested it with PHP 5.

  4. Paul Butcher says:

    Thanks for the quick reply, Graham.

    PHP 5.0.4 (cli) (built: Mar 1 2006 18:56:04)
    Copyright (c) 1997-2004 The PHP Group
    Zend Engine v2.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1998-2004 Zend Technologies

  5. White Shadow says:

    I found the problem – I had accidentally used a short open tag in one method. You can download the fixed version here.

  6. Paul Butcher says:

    That’s fixed it – thanks!

  7. Paul Butcher says:

    Hmm – so it’s worked, but the feed is showing me comments that have been marked as spam by Akismet. Is that what I should expect?

    Thanks!

  8. White Shadow says:

    Nope, that’s a bug. I’ve uploaded a fixed version.

  9. Sven says:

    @ White Shadow

    I know, this is an old post, but your plugin does what i was looking for.

    I can see that you have changed the plugin to only show comments for moderation, but i would like to se comments for moderation and Aksimet marked comments (spam). Is that possible? I can edit the code, if you just give me a hint 🙂

    Thanks

  10. Jānis Elsts says:

    Sure, should be easy enough. Try changing the query on line 58 to include spam comments, like this: “WHERE (comment_approved = ‘0’ OR comment_approved = ‘spam’)”.

  11. Sven says:

    Thanks a lot Jānis Elsts, for sharing this plugin and your knowledge.

    Merry Christmas

  12. Sven says:

    After the 3.5 upgrade of WordPress the comment moderation feed does not work (at least not on my servers).

    I have tried to search WordPress to look for clues, but could not find any changes that matched…

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