Author: Jani

Just upgraded one of my themes (the only one I’m still using that I can truly say I’ve created myself) to finally utilize WordPress 2.7’s new comment listing function. This made separating actual comments from pings a breeze compared to what it used to be.

The only slight problem was with porting the old separation of every other comment with a different class; since I needed to use a custom callback to retain the old look, I couldn’t utilize the automated classification done by wp_list_comments(). In the end all it took was these three lines added to my callback function:

global $comment_alt;
$oddcomment = $comment_alt % 2 ? 'alt' : '';
$comment_alt++;

With these in place I could now bring in the <li> tag from the old template without any further tweaking:

<li id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"
class="<?php echo $oddcomment?>">

Every now and then Akismet falsely identifies an innocent comment as spam. From the commenter’s perspective this results in their comment vanishing into thin air. In reality that’s not the case, as the comment can be recovered from Akismet’s queue, but there’s no way for the commenter to know this. I’m a little uneasy with the idea of my commenters left thinking their contribution has gone to waste, so I’d like to give them a hint of what has happened. Additionally, I could provide them with an email link, prompting them to contact me about the misidentification so I can fix it.

The trouble is, once a comment is marked spam by Akismet, there’s apparently no way to react to it in the comments template, as there is to comments ending up in the traditional moderation system. The code fetching the comments for the comments template is in the comments_template() function at comment-template.php. There’s a comment marked ‘@todo’ to use API instead of SELECTs, followed by three queries. I suspect the todo refers to the fact that as it is, there’s no way to tap into those queries short from editing them directly by hacking the file. Some people, myself included, would rather not do that because of the way it inconveniences upgrades.

Until a clean way to tap into the way comments are fetched, or better yet, the functionality I’m after being integrated directly into Akismet, I guess I’ll have to do with a big sign saying if your comment seems to have vanished, read this. Then I’ll link it to a page explaining how to contact me about the misidentification, and show it to every commenter beside the comment form. It’s ugly, but still better than giving them the impression my comment box is just a big black hole.