Smiley Bug: Comment Moderation Problem in WordPress 2.7
Since upgrading to WordPress 2.7, I’ve had an annoying issue with comment moderation. It wasn’t a showstopping problem and I was able to work around it but when I did my personal WordPress spring cleaning last weekend, I decided to find a solution to the problem.
So, what was the problem? Well, comments were going into moderation that shouldn’t have been based on my Discussion settings.
I have my Discussion settings to moderate the first two times someone comments and if there are more than two links in the comment.
Once someone has commented and been approved twice I’ve decided they are trustworthy and they can then leave a comment without being moderated. Unless, the comment has more than two links in it. Then it has to be moderated again because we know how spammers (not my visitors) love to leave viagra links.
But after upgrading to 2.7, people who had long since been approved commentators were being put into moderation. I couldn’t figure out a pattern to it either. Sometimes their comments went into moderation and other times they didn’t – I didn’t see any logic behind it.
Like I said, this wasn’t a big blog problem but it annoyed me because I didn’t want my regular visitors to be moderated.
So, I went to the WordPress forums and discovered that there is a bug that Otto calls the smiley bug.
Under Settings > Writing you can set emoticons, or the little smiley faces, to be converted into an image. WordPress 2.7 thinks the image is a link so the comment goes into moderation. Remember, I allow two links and believe those are already being used by the url for the commentator’s website and commentluv, so if the commentator included an emoticon, the comment got put into moderation.
The smiley bug has been added to Trac, the WordPress bug database, and will be corrected in a future release.
There are, however, two workarounds in the meantime:
- In Settings > Writing uncheck the box to have emoticons converted to images. This is the solution I decided to use.
- In Settings > Discussion increase the number of links allowed in a comment to something high like 10. I didn’t go with this solution because I couldn’t decide how many links to allow and I felt that it increased the possibility of spam getting through.
I was really pleased to find out that this was a bug and what was causing the problem. I’m also glad that there are a couple of workarounds.
Have any of you experienced this in 2.7?
photo credit: Major Clanger
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April 2, 2009 at 1:05 am
I have experienced this at the beginning, but it seems to be slowly correcting itself.
Vered – MomGrind´s last blog post – Suffering For Beauty
April 2, 2009 at 9:06 am
Hi Vered – Really? I’ve found it to be very inconsistent and turned off the emoticons so comments were moderated the way that I want them to be.
April 2, 2009 at 2:06 am
That’s an odd quirk. I have all my comments moderated, and one thing I have noticed is that certain comments will not be approved when I initially click the Approve button. I have to go into the comment again and change the drop down to Approved as well for it to actually publish (although it will email me the first time when it doesn’t work). Haven’t figured out the work around on that one yet.
~ Kristi
Kikolani´s last blog post – A Comprehensive Guide to Using RSS
April 2, 2009 at 9:08 am
Hi Kristi – I’ve had that problem too but it’s a unrelated. I think it’s either related to Ajax or the connection to the server and the database. There’s another issue to add to my list :-)
April 2, 2009 at 2:08 am
Ps. I’m using the same email as my Twitter account, but that’s not my Twitter account.
April 2, 2009 at 9:11 am
Hi Kristi – I saw you question over at the forums for the plugin – I dropped the database and have deactivated it. It was starting to make everyone @show. I don’t know if I’m going to reinstall it or not.
April 2, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Thanks. I was getting nervous that someone might think I was @show… not the kind of content I want to be associated with. I’m glad it wasn’t just me.
~ Kristi
Kikolani´s last blog post – A Comprehensive Guide to Using RSS
April 2, 2009 at 8:04 am
Well i’ve experienced this here… I have been “held back to moderation” randomly and i always thought this was the stupid Akismet :P Ops a smiley ;) Anyways i had no idea this was a buggy but i might check out the code see if i can find a workaround in there ;) Nice post Kim!
stratosg´s last blog post – Member Of The Month: March
April 2, 2009 at 9:12 am
Hi Stratos – I was so surprised to discover what was causing the problem. It was so inconsistent and the emoticons didn’t even occur to me. I guess people shouldn’t smile at me :-)
April 2, 2009 at 8:46 am
Kim – This is brilliant. I’ve experienced this as well – but couldn’t put my finger on what the trigger was. This is why I find what you do so relevant and valuable. It’s helpful to us, the decidedly challenged, who are still gamely navigating without much more than the slightest clue of the mechanics. The car should start and run flawlessly when I turn the key, right? I shouldn’t have to get under the hood to change the oil and stuff. Thank you. I avoided smiley’s in this comment.
Betsy Wuebker´s last blog post – ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE . . .
April 2, 2009 at 9:14 am
Hi Betsy – LOL – Yes, please don’t smile at me ;-) You can use them now on this site. I turned off the conversion of smileys into images until the bug is corrected. It was one of those annoying things – it didn’t really affect using WordPress but I couldn’t figure out why frequent visitors were going into moderation when they should have been automatically approved.
And thanks :-)
April 2, 2009 at 8:58 am
I’m glad you found out it was a bug. Its annoying but at least you know its not just your site.
I was starting to get offended. ;-)
April 2, 2009 at 9:15 am
Hi Jim – LOL – I think it was happening to you, Stratos and Ajith the most. The three of you must be heavy smiley users ;-)
April 2, 2009 at 10:13 am
I think you are right with your decision, just convert smiles to the image, even after the bug fixed it is better to keep it as image instead of a link.
Chinese Girl´s last blog post – Shanghai Yichang 6 Day Tour
April 2, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Hi – I think once the bug is fixed it will be an image but it won’t be a link. I’ll probably just leave things as is.
April 2, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Till now i have not faced such a problem. But if it face it, i know what to do.
Madhur Kapoor´s last blog post – Capture and Add Annotations to Screenshots with Greenshot
April 2, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Hi Madhur – Glad you haven’t had a problem with this. Thanks.
April 2, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I haven’t upgraded yet, but very good advanced notice. Thanks. :)
Dennis Edell´s last blog post – Opening INTERNAL Links- New Window or Same Window?
April 2, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Hi Dennis – You’re welcome ;-)
April 2, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I long ago turned off smilies. It was putting smilies in the footnotes of my posts! So I never noticed that WP 2.7 bumped comments with smilies to moderation.
But it’s good to know about this, since I have changed the way I do footnotes (thanks, Stratos!) and I could turn them back on if I chose.
Now, for the record: ;-)
Mike Nichols´s last blog post – Beyond Zits: Acne and Anxiety Disorders Part 2
April 2, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Hi Mike – It’s interesting that you had them turned off for a different reason. I guess smileys are really just grinning at us about the mischief they are about to cause ;-)
I recently sent out a tweet about Stratos’ footnotes plugin and it seems like a lot of people were interested – he did a great job with it.
April 3, 2009 at 9:15 am
Oh! That must explain it, I just figured when I upgraded my approved list was lost or something.
Tracy´s last blog post – I’d like to introduce you to my son
April 3, 2009 at 9:37 am
Hi Tracy – You know, I’m really glad that I wasn’t the only one being affected by the smiley bug. :-)
April 4, 2009 at 2:08 pm
This is good to know! I didn’t think the smileys were giving me a problem, but I have also been changing spam plugins, so I may not have noticed. One plugin started giving me false positives, where even my own comments went into moderation, maybe this was triggered by the smiley bug… Right now things are fine… or so it seems, I will keep an eye open! :-)
Palma | Buddha Trance´s last blog post – Clearing your body and mind, through your bare feet
April 5, 2009 at 8:07 am
Hi Palma – It’s hard to tell when you’ve been changing a lot of things. I guess you could at least turn the emoticons off and see if that makes a difference. And I would be SO frustrated if my own comments went into moderation – LOL
April 5, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I noticed this also; i think this is mainly because you can attribute ‘links’ to the smilies.
let me try and example:
:D
This can slip through without you noticing.
Donace | The Nexus´s last blog post – Traffic Android Review
April 5, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Hi Donace – Hmm … interesting. The link isn’t clickable though.
What is the solution – have all comments with links go into moderation?
April 6, 2009 at 4:44 pm
yea its not clickable (may be I messed up in editing) but it works they can sneak in ;)
Askimet has started to spot these now and blocking them but still need to be careful :D
Donace | The Nexus´s last blog post – Traffic Android Review
April 6, 2009 at 12:37 am
Hi Kim. Thanks for posting this. I was having the same problem, although I can’t say for sure if everyone who was going into moderation was using smiley faces. Since upgrading to 2.7.1 I haven’t noticed this problem, but just in case, I turned off the conversion of smileys into images.
Davina´s last blog post – When Surgery is a Laughing Matter
April 6, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Hi Davina – Comments that should be approved aren’t going into moderation for me anymore and I am running 2.7.1 – I was when I was having the problem. I hope it corrects it for you too – it’s such a minor thing but annoying.