Ability to mark a comment as spam from the trash

[nacin]

Say you're scrolling through comments in the trash and you realize a comment should have ended up in spam instead.

There's no easy way to untrash then re-spam the comment — you'd lose it and it'd get restored to its previous status. You can't edit it and modify its status from there, either.

I think there should probably be a way to spam a comment from the trash. (For that matter, I don't think there's an issue with being able to edit a trashed comment, too. Perhaps you want to modify it then untrash/approve it.)

[knutsp]

Some thoughts on this:

The only normal reason to scroll through trashed comments is to look for a comment that you recently trashed. You should not trash genuine spam. In the rare case that you accidentally trash a comment that should have been marked as spam, why is there a big problem restoring it first, than mark is as spam? The comment will usually be a recent one.

Logically, spam is a status. Trashed comments is special property. Users are used to only have three options when seeing something trashed, restore, delete permanently or let it be for automatic deletion. Not wise to mess with this logic, as this is the "recycle bin" concept in many applications and systems.

Last, if we were to allow changing anything, or the status especially, then this should be implemented for other objects, too, for a scenario like this:

I trash a published post because I didn't like it. I then have second thoughts, and think it could be published after some editing, later on. I scroll through trashed posts and find it. Should I be able to restore it directly to a draft, pending or private, or just restore it, then change it to a draft?

I say plugin material for such edge cases, for comments, and for other objects.

[nacin]

In this case, I went through the trash, and saw a dozen obviously spam comments that were trashed by another editor. I wanted to report them as spam in order to register them against Akismet, but I realized it would not be straightforward to do.

This is probably plugin material, or certainly might not happen unless trash is re-examined across the board.

[knutsp]

Make a note to "another editor": Please don't trash spam, mark them as such. Only unwanted, non-spam comments should be trashed. :-)

I admit the exact same thing happened to me a few years ago. I explained to my "other editor" the difference between spam and other unwanted comments, and the report spam (learning) function in Akismet. It rarely happened again.

I see the use case for big sites with many editors.

[solarissmoke]

Replying to nacin:

In this case, I went through the trash, and saw a dozen obviously spam comments that were trashed by another editor. I wanted to report them as spam in order to register them against Akismet, but I realized it would not be straightforward to do.

May be worth noting here that Akismet is *very* picky about what comment transitions it will act on (have a look at function akismet_transition_comment_status in the latest version of the plugin). The comment has to be transitioning to/from approved/awaiting moderation (direct transition from trash will be ignored), and it has to be done by a real user (i.e., if a plugin does the transition then it will be ignored).

I tried to do something similar in one of my plugins - transition from trash to awaiting moderation to spam to try and get akismet to pick it up, but it's very messy to do, particularly because of the POST/GET restrictions.

[c3mdigital]

Based on ​solarissmoke's comments about how Akismet handles comment transitions I'm closing as wont fix.

[SergeyBiryukov]

If we improve the workflow here, I guess Akismet would adapt. If anyone still wants this, feel free to reopen.

[nacin]

Rescuing this because I think it's a good idea. You shouldn't need to untrash something (and potentially republish it) in order to mark it as spam. Akismet isn't the only spam-learning service out there, but I'm sure they'd adapt if we added this.

[mordauk]

Seems perfectly reasonable to me to mark a trashed comment as spam.

Acknowledging that something may need to be done with Akismet as well, is there any reason can't just show the standard Spam link in the comment action links for trashed comments? ​http://screencloud.net/v/aH9I

[nacin]

Replying to mordauk:

is there any reason can't just show the standard Spam link in the comment action links for trashed comments?

No reason that I can think of. It just needs a patch and some testing.

[mordauk]

Allow trashed comments to be marked as spam

[mordauk]

19256.patch modifies both the row actions and the bulk actions to allow trashed comments to be marked as spam.

[rhyswynne]

Tested 19256.patch on 4.0-alpha-20140628. Patch appears to work as expected.

[wonderboymusic]

In 28913:

Allow comments in the trash to marked as spam.

Props mordauk.
Fixes #19256.