Comments screen: audit all the background color animations

[afercia]

Noticed some weird behavior, to reproduce: go in the Comments screen (in the "All" view), and mark as spam or move to the trash an approved comment. The comment row background will quickly "flash" to red and then the comment row will disappear.

Do the same on an unapproved comment: no red flash.

There are also other cases where this happens, seems all related to pending comments. By the way, the JavaScript animations still run and the background is animated behind the scenes. It just can't be seen because the pending comment row background color is now set on the th and td elements that hide the change on the tr background. Looks like this JavaScript part wasn't updated after the CSS changes in WordPress 3.8.

There are also other old things that missed to be updated, for example at some point JavaScript still uses #FFFFE0. This was the background color used for unapproved comments in WordPress 3.7 but they use #FEF7F1 since 3.8.

I'd propose two options:

1. Fix the animations :)
2. Get rid of them. Apparently, not so many users have complained about the (partial) lack of color animations in the last 2 years

I'd lean toward the second option. There are several lines of JavaScript in edit-comments.js and wp-lists.js that could be removed, they are hard to maintain and being a bit old code they also violate the separation of structure, presentation and behavior principle. Yes, the JS could be refactored and maybe use a more modern approach but for, I'd say, a very little benefit.

So before any patch attempt, this would need a decision. Any thoughts more than welcome.

In the screenshot below, the red flash on pending comments, how it used to be on WordPress 3.7

[rachelbaker]

@afercia I believe we need some way to make the user aware that an item is about to disappear from the screen. The method we use does not have to match the color animation we have now, but there should be some form of feedback.

[afercia]

Replying to rachelbaker:

@afercia I believe we need some way to make the user aware that an item is about to disappear from the screen.

Then: option 1 :)

[helen]

Related: #31006

[karmatosed]

I would agree that we should have some indication in animation of the state transition like this. I'd not be keen we removed them entirely.