Certain comment authors always held in moderation

mayo.mick

(Mods, not sure if this is the correct thread or if it should be in development)

I have a problem on a wordpress blog which for the life of me cannot figure out.

Was asked to have a look at a fairly high traffic blog, bit of a change/face lift. All that was done was a simple theme change. While in the site, some plugins needed updating and the core wordpress was out of date (3.9 if I remember correctly). Blog owner was afraid to do updates as a plugin update crashed the site previously.

Anyway, I updated everything. Wordpress 3.9 to 4.7, huge jump. This is when problems began with comments being held in moderation. As I said, its a fairly high traffic site with a lot of daily posts and comments.

People that are being snagged are long time commentators (some but not all). All settings are correct on the site, author name and email required, commentator has to have a previous comment approved. (I'm an admin on the site, using the same email as when not logged in and I'm been held in moderation too). Can't figure out what's causing it.

There are some email / usernames / IP's blacklisted in the moderation on the site.

Would it be because of the huge jump in updating wordpress core from 3.9 to 4.7? There has been numerous core updates since, which I though may have fixed the bug but no luck. Has anyone else come across this?

Thanks for any help/insight to whats causing this.

biko

Well, WP needs to be upgraded to make sure security etc is all up-to-date

Is there a staging site you can experiment on?

For others, this is what we're talking about:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-on-how-to-moderate-comments-in-wordpress/

mayo.mick

Hi Biko, thanks for replying.

Wordpress is up to date. Its when it was updated from 3.9 to 4.7 when this issue cropped up. It only seems to affect regular commentators who had their user name and email entered before the update. I tested it last night, same username but changed email, 1st comment held for moderation (as it should), once approved, 2nd posted no problem. Switched back to my normal email and am being held again (even though I'm admin but not logged in). Have also checked all plugins but no conflicts. It really has me baffled

There are a good few IP's and email blacklisted for moderation, there are also a few completely blacklisted. I have switched of the "comments need approval" which does cure the problem, but the blog owner does not want it set like this due to large amount of trolls.

Its not a huge problem for the blog owner, as all comments need to be checked (with some needing editing/deleting). Regular posters I think are being put off as all their comments are constantly being held in moderation, making them feel they are being watched or monitored.