id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc
6536,"Introduce the concept of ""read"" and ""unread"" comments for better workflow in the admin",markjaquith,markjaquith,"The Moderation Queue is a great way to manage your comment workflow.  All comments go in there, and you approve, spam, or delete them.  At the end you get a nice little ""0"" and you know you've dealt with all new comments.  This doesn't work for people who don't moderate every comment.  They have no idea when they are done, and which comments they have or have not looked at.

I'd like to add a {{{comment_read}}} column to the comments table.  It would be either ""1"" or ""0"".  There would be a new sub-tab for Comments: ""Unread comments (%d)""  This page would be just like the Moderation page, except that it would only show comments with {{{comment_read = 0}}}.  This could act as ""comment workflow central"" for both people who pre-moderate and people who post-moderate.  Unapproved comments would have the actions: Approve, Spam and Delete.  Approved comments would have the actions: Archive, Spam and Delete.  Clicking any of these actions would both carry out that action AND mark that comment as read, making it disappear from the ""Unread comments"" page.  (""Archive"" only marks it as read).

Enterprising theme developers could even have this status shown on the public blog, so that people know whether their comments have been seen.

For background on this idea, please see [http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/the-comment-inbox/ The Comment Inbox]

Note that this has benefits for people who moderate every comment, because they can now store comments in the moderation queue (comments they want to remove from the blog, but not delete) without that getting in the way of their comment workflow.",enhancement,accepted,normal,Future Release,Comments,2.5,normal,,needs-patch,