Send Comment Moderation E-mail only to Post Author

Send Comment Moderation E-mail only to Post Author

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Download Version 0.4

Requires WordPress: 3.7 or higher
Compatible up to: 4.0.16
Downloads: 11386

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
# Votes: 2

This plugin could also have been called Don’t bother the Site Administrator with every other author’s Comment Moderation Notifications, unless the author has no moderation rights but since that’s a slightly longer title, I chose to keep it as simple as I could. However, it explains well what this plugin does:

Normaly, when a comment gets submitted to a particular post, the author of that post gets a notification about it. But when that comment is held for moderation (which depends on your sites comment settings) then the moderation notification is sent to both the post Author (if he/she has moderation rights) and the sites Administrative moderator e-mail address as configured under Settings > General at the same time.

For many blogs or sites where the owner is the only author and his/her account uses the same e-mail address as the Administrative moderator e-mail address, this will boil down to one message to one address. But when the Site Admin is not the only author, like on colaboration sites or sites managed by a webmaster or designer where other people like the client usually posts, this might result in flooding the admins mailbox with moderation messages that are not really his/her concern. The site admin, with enough on his/her mind already, is bothered with each and every new comment in the moderation queue.

This plugin changes that.

Just install and activate it: All post comment moderation notifications will be sent only to each respective Post Author. If, by any chance, the post author has no moderation rights (Contributor level) or there is no author e-mail set then the default site e-mail address will still get the notification.

Works on WordPress 3.7 and above in both Normal and Multi-site mode.

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Frequently Asked Questions

I see no settings page
There is no settings page. The plugin will do only one thing : make comment moderation notifications go to the authors e-mail address, and no longer the site moderator address.
Nothing looks different. Is it working at all?
To test if it is working:

  1. Check your Settings > Discussion settings and make sure that (I) at E-mail me whenever at least A comment is held for moderation and (II) at Before a comment appears at least Comment author must have a previously approved comment are checked.
  2. Open an incognito browser window, go to your site as an anonymous visitor and post a comment to a post from anyone with at least author level (contributor has no moderation rights!) other than the main site administrator.
  3. Switch back to your normal browser window, verify that comment went into the moderation queue, verify that you as site administrator did not receive any moderation e-mail and then ask the post author if he/she did receive the moderation notification correctly 🙂
I get no messages
This plugin does not send any messages. It only changes the addressee of the comment moderation queue notifications that are sent by WordPress.

If nobody get any of these notifications, disable the plugin and test again. You will probably still not get any notifications and the problem lies with WordPress not being able to send emails via PHP. There are other plugins or tutorials about server configuration that can help you with that…

Does this plugin work on WPMU / WP3+ Multi Site mode?
Yep, it was made for Multisite 🙂

You can install it in /plugins/ and activate it site-by-site or network wide. Or you can upload it to /mu-plugins/ for automatic (Must-use) inclusion.

Download

Latest version: Download Send Comment Moderation E-mail only to Post Author 0.4 [zip]
Downloaded 11386 times.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars with a total of 2 votes on WordPress.org »

33 thoughts on “Send Comment Moderation E-mail only to Post Author”

  1. Oliver Lippert

    Hey There,
    I have an feature, may you include it, so I don’t have to do it on my own 🙂

    “[ ] E-Mail the Author whenever an Comment is written”.

    I set up Antispam Bee, it catches the most of Comments, so all Comments will be displayed directly, I can’t use your Plugin, but if you add this Function, I can use this Plugin to three or four of my Blogs .) Because the Author can follow his own Post-Comments without doing anything.

    Please contact me, what you mean to this.

    Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi Oliver, do you not have that option on your Settings > Discussion (wp-admin/options-discussion.php) admin page?

      Reply ↓
      1. Oliver Lippert

        Of course I have, but if I’am not the author, I don’t want to get Mails for comments. So I hope your Plugin can to that: E-Mail to the author “an comment has been left”.

        Reply ↓
        1. RavanH Post author

          I see… Although this plugin is designed for moderation notifications only, I’ll take your request in consideration. I cannot promise anything soon as I’m a bit short in time right now…

          Reply ↓
    1. Rolf Allard van Hagen Post author

      Ehm… well, yes and no. New comments (after plugin installation) on old post, yes. But not old/existing comments on old posts.

      This plugin is not so much an extension as it is just an alteration of the WordPress behaviour by changing the default To address for comment moderation notifications. You could of course install the plugin and then log out and comment anonymously (to make the comments go into the moderation queue) with a text like “Hi dear author, please log in on our site to moderate your awaiting comments queue” on each posts that has old comments to be moderated… Just an idea 😉

      Reply ↓
  4. Lacey

    Thanks for the quick reply. Still not working, though. I’ve tested many comments/posts and checked spam filters. Would other installed plugins affect how it works? We have Antispam Bee and Google Analytics installed as well.

    Reply ↓
  5. jan

    Hi,

    I have “pages”, where I assign different authors to. On each of these pages, you get a comment field below.
    Tried this plug-in, but it does not seems to solve the problem, that I want the assigned author to get the “approval email”.

    Please help! Thanks!

    Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Which WordPress version are you using? If it is below 3.1, you need to install plugin version 0.1 …

      Reply ↓
        2. RavanH Post author

          Hi Jan, I tested this in my own site but cannot reproduce the issue. Any other plugins running on the site that might interfere? Could you disable all other plugins and switch to the default Twenty Eleven theme for a minute and try again?

          Reply ↓
  6. Juha

    Hello, what about when using a plugin like “WP Comments Moderators” that adds moderator rigthts to selected subscribers and sends email notification about comments in the queue.. With your plugin enabled, this one doesn’t work anymore…

    Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi Juha, it sounds like the two plugins are incompatible and light even use the same pluggable function. I would have to test this to be able to say more about it. Sadly, I do not have time right now to look into it.

      Reply ↓
  7. KUMO

    I’m about to use some of your script to send emails to post authors once a day if the post is older than 90 days.

    I’ll let you know how this works out! Thanks for the plugin!

    Reply ↓

  8. Pingback: E-mail an Autor WP Plugin

  9. Sims Wright

    Any chance you would create a version where it would notify a person for moderation based on category? I run a church site and I’d like one person to moderate comments to youth posts, another to moderate comments to missions posts, etc.

    Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi Sims, I would have to create a completely different plugin for that and it might even have been done already. Have you searched for other plugins that allow more control over commenting, moderation and notification? Otherwise, the only option is to use my simple plugin (as it is now) and make the comment moderators the author of all posts in their respective category.

      Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi Joe, yes it should still work. The plugin should still change the addressee of the moderation queue notifications. Do e-mails get sent to the main admin email address when the plugin is deactivated? If not, the problem lies elsewhere…

      Reply ↓
      1. Joe Elmendorf

        Thanks for the quick response. I ended up figuring out that NO emails were being sent…so I installed the WP SMTP plugin and your plugin worked! Thanks!

        Reply ↓
  12. phuongncn

    Thanks for great plugin.

    I tried to translate the content email (“New comment on your post…”) into Vietnamese (my language) by editing the comment-moderation-to-author.php. But it did not change, the content was still in english even I disabled and enable the plugin again. How can I change the email content? I suggest an option for this, that would be great 🙂

    Thanks in advance 🙂

    P.s. I used WP 3.5.2 🙂

    Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi phuongncn, this plugin does not use any new text strings. All translations can be found in the main WordPress translation database file…

      Reply ↓
    1. RavanH Post author

      Hi sudharshan, there is nothing that will appear on your dashboard or anywhere else. There are no options. The plugin only removes the website’s main e-mail (admin) address from the recipients list for comment moderation notifications.

      Reply ↓
  14. Jen

    Wordfence is now giving me a warning “The Plugin “Comment Moderation E-mail only to Author” appears to be abandoned… It was last updated 2 years 8 months ago. It may have compatibility problems with the current version of WordPress or unknown security issues.” Any chance there will be future updates to this plugin?

    Reply ↓
    1. Pharéo

      Hi Jen, the plugin should not cause any problems. I’ll do a simple update soon to the version compatibility and Wordfence should stop with that message 🙂

      Reply ↓

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