Dashboard At a Glance: comment counter isn't updated if to approve comment

[antonrinas]

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
Log in as administrator, create new post, log out,
log in as subscriber user, create new comment for created post, log out,
log in as administrator, approve subscriber's comment on Dashboard page in "Activity" group box using hidden menu item "Approve".
EXPECTED RESULT: subscriber's comment became approved, link "View", total comments counter is updated.
ACTUAL RESULT: subscriber's comment became approved, there is no total comments counter (see attachment).

[antonrinas]

Dashboard screenshot

[Latz]

Replying to antonrinas:
Tried to reproduce the error. System worked as expected, no problems. Do you have any plugins activated? If so, can you retry with a clean installation?

[afercia]

This happens only when there are 0 approved comments. The comment counts in wp_dashboard_right_now() should probably be displayed also in the rare, initial, condition when there are 0 approved comments and only pending comments.

Fixing this initial condition, then the AJAX count update works fine, as far as I see.

[rachelbaker]

@afercia Looks like your approach in 35519.patch​ goes against [29785], so the "fix" here would have to be done with JS.
See #26738

[afercia]

@rachelbaker if I remember correctly, the displayed number will be always the one of approved comments. We just need to print out the element to update via JS even when there are "0" comments approved.

[rachelbaker]

Remove the conditional check on wp_count_comments

[rachelbaker]

@afercia It looks to me as though we should just remove the conditional check if ( $num_comm && $num_comm->approved ), see 35519.2.patch​. Any reason you would prefer your approach?

[rachelbaker]

BTW: I was incorrect here:

@afercia Looks like your approach in 35519.patch​ goes against [29785], so the "fix" here would have to be done with JS.
See #26738

because you were only adding to the conditional, you didn't change the displayed property. Sorry about that.

[rachelbaker]

After a Slack discussion with @afercia and sleeping on it, I believe 35519.patch​ is the better approach because it provides sanity checks for the filterable result of wp_count_comments().

[SergeyBiryukov]

In 37335:

Dashboard: Display the comment counts in wp_dashboard_right_now() in the rare initial condition when there are 0 approved comments and only pending comments, so the AJAX count update could work.

Props afercia.
Fixes #35519.