Bug: The "Your comment is awaiting moderation."-Bug on Blog-comments "explained"

[joachimrees1]

[This is a issue know to the team, Moshe told me about it, but I want to make it transparent (and linkable) to the whole community, that's why I post it here].

Symptom: You post a blog comment, but it's not visible to others - you see it with a "Your comment is awaiting moderation."

This happens when: your comments contains any links.

Workaround: re-post it without links.

Or (better!) : approve it in https://blogs.sap.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php

(Thanks Jelena for providing this approval link! )

best

Joachim

PS: just came to my mind: this might be a feature in the original intention, as you don't want spammers comments (with links in them) to immediately go to public...

It doesn’t work out here, though, as it punishes the users that take the extra steps to provide links to the stuff they talk about

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Hello Joachim,

I apologize for the delay in my reply. We were able to discover what is causing this thanks to a dedicated community member. Whenever you have a link in the comment it is sent to moderation.

As I mentioned, we are aware of this and working on resolving it. We will release the captured comments:)

[moshenaveh · Accepted solution]

Hello Joachim,

Can you please confirm this bug was resolved. A fix was deployed today.

Thank you,

Moshe

[joachimrees1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Moshe,

yes, this seems fine now - a comment I posted with a link went live without further steps.

BUT:

It now appears while it was really bugging "valid" users like me and many others, it seems to have been a great defense against comment-spammers, that is now no longer in place:

Raised in Coffee Corner:
https://answers.sap.com/comments/184863/view.html

Bug-Report:
https://answers.sap.com/questions/184380/bugno-alert-moderator-button-in-the-blog-comments.html

The solution might be some kind of reputation management for new/untrusted users.
(E.g. the first n comments with links go to moderation - if those are ok, comments of that user can go live immediately (unless she gets reported more the x times, then it's back to moderation)

Oh, and the "workaround-link" (wp-admin) would have to be disabled, too!)

).

best

Joachim