Protection from Spammy Comment Links in Admin Area

[ma7moudat]

I was checking out my spam comments section and accidentally cliked a link in one of the comments.

Fortunately, no harm was done. However, shouldn't the admin area have spammy comment links be disabled by default? Or at least trigger a warning message?

[tyxla]

Welcome to the WordPress Core Trac, @ma7moudat!

This is a nice idea IMHO. Attaching a patch for that.

[tyxla]

Links in spam comments in the administration will now trigger a confirmation window, allowing to prevent unwanted clicks on malicious links.

[ma7moudat]

Thank you!

Always glad to contribute to our beloved WordPress :)

[toscho]

Please add a filter, so we can disable this extra click. This is annoying for keyboard users who know what they are doing. Thanks.

[helen]

I would not like to see a JS confirm for this context. I wonder if it would be better to do something similar to what Akismet does in showing the URL inline and removing the link entirely, making browsing to that URL a very purposeful activity.

[rachelbaker]

+1 to @helen's suggested approach of removing the anchor element and displaying the href inline.

[rachelbaker]

@ma7moudat After #36380 and giving this some thought, I don't like the idea of having special behavior for links in comments with a "spam" status.

I believe the Akismet plugin takes with comment content links is the best experience with any comment regardless of status:

• href values are displayed alongside linked text
• hovering over a link shows a preview of the location site

Because the scope of this ticket is narrowly focused on providing special handling for links within the content of comments marked as spam, I am going to suggest this be closed as a wontfix. However, what can we do to improve how WordPress core presents comments within the admin for moderators regardless of the comment status?