Comments number is wrong

[sidati]

Hi,
the comment number return the number of approved comments, this means all approved comments even those are replies to unapproved comments, for example if a user post comment and people replied to it, then the admin decide to hide this parent comment by disapproving it, the comment number will decrease only by one and keeping counting the hidden replies

So there are two option to fix that :

1. Hold/Disapprove all children when disapproving the parent.
2. Recalculate the comment number and excluding comments has an unapproved parent.

Regards,
Sidati

[sidati]

I prefer the 2nd option even it's not so good for performance, maybe someone has better idea :)
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/36409/36409.patch

[sidati]

Working Patch and more optimized

[boonebgorges]

Hi @sidati - Thanks for the patch. I agree that this is unexpected and incorrect behavior.

Your basic idea for fixing it seems right to me. A couple comments on the patch:

• Could you generate it from the root of your WP installation? It makes it a bit easier to apply and test.
• Your $depth logic reads backward to me. I mean, I can see that the patch works, but I would've counted the depth up instead of down. Maybe our minds work differently ;) Anyway, I wonder if the algorithm would be more transparent (and less subject to bugs related to 'thread_comment_depth' if it looked something like this (pseudocode):

$bad_parents = $wpdb->get_col( "SELECT comment_ID from $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved != 1" );
$_bad_parents = array();

do {
    $_bad_parents = $wpdb->get_col( "SELECT comment_ID from $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_parent IN (" . implode( ',', array_map( 'intval', $bad_parents ) ) . ")";
    $bad_parents += $_bad_parents;
} while ( $_bad_parents );

This separates the initial comment_approved query for clarity, and it ensures that we keep walking down the tree as long as bad comments are found.

We will also need unit tests to cover the problem.

[sidati]

@boonebgorges;
I like your approach but if you realize the loop is infinite :), so i add a third variable to hold only the found children IDs to be used in the next loop.

You can test it now : 36409-3.patch

[ambrosiawt]

For what it's worth, this looks very similar to #18603. I sort of hope it fixes that one as well. :)

Art

[sidati]

I'll create a plugin on github to solve this issue and post it here with unit-tests

[pbearne]

@sidati did you ever create the unit tests?

This update revises the logic used in the wp_update_comment_count_now function. The change ensures that unapproved comments and their children are not included when calculating the comment count for a post. This method involves creating a list of 'bad parents', which represents comments that are not approved, and their associated child comments.

[pbearne]

I have refreshed the patched

[sidati]

Hey @pbearne, It’s been years and I don’t remember creating any test.

[audrasjb]

As per today's bug scrub, I'm moving it to 6.9 for further review/discussion.

[jeannetteunifreiburg]

Test Report

Description

This report validates whether the indicated patch works as expected.

Patch tested: ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/6431

Environment

• WordPress: 6.8.1
• PHP: 8.2.27
• Server: nginx/1.26.1
• Database: mysqli (Server: 8.0.35 / Client: mysqlnd 8.2.27)
• Browser: Firefox 138.0
• OS: macOS
• Theme: Twenty Twenty-Five 1.2
• MU Plugins: None activated
• Plugins:
  • Test Reports 1.2.0

Actual Results

1. ❌ Issue NOT resolved with patch. Comment count is still wrong.
2. Raw file downloaded from git has syntactical errors. When I fix that (missing semicolon), the bug is still there.
3. When I try to run the PR in playground, playground crashes (MacOS, both Firefox and Safari)

Additional Notes

• None

Supplemental Artifacts

None

[SirLouen]

@pbearne it seems that apart from the issue with the semicolon, the patch is not passing.
Can you give it a go when you find some time?

[pbearne]

Replying to SirLouen:

@pbearne it seems that apart from the issue with the semicolon, the patch is not passing.
Can you give it a go when you find some time?

Updated

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/36409

## Fixes

1. Get all the comments related to post and created the lookup based on the comment ID.
2. Loop through each comment and check for its child<-->parent and add only if parent comment is approved.

[hbhalodia]

Hi Team, I have raised the new PR which uses PHP logic to check for the parent and child comment and update the comment count for the comments that are approved and child comments whose parents are approved.

PR - ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/9277

Have checked the above patch and it was not wokring as expected, hence worked on the same and created a new PR for it.

Thank You,