The Report button does not show up

I don’t know about that extra code ?? It is a forked plugin.

In my experience, it should just show up with the correct hooks.
Can you share a link to your website? And which theme do you use? If it is a commercial theme, can you send a zipfile of it to [email protected] ?

Hi Marcel,

Thank you for replying. I just sent you an email with all the info you requested, including how to access my staging site and have a look at it.

Thanks.

Hi,
I didn’t forget you. Please be aware that this is free support and sometimes I have other things to do. I was planning on coming back to you today. It does need some attention, because this is quite a tricky plugin.

I tested with your theme. The theme is currently unmaintained, you might want to plan searching for a new theme that is maintained.

It could be that they show up now, because of caching. Do you use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache? It might be that the hosting provider uses Varnish.
Sometimes there are ways to clear the cache, either in WordPress Dashboard or the panel of the hosting provider.

At the time I forked this plugin and fixed some bugs, I found out that all this stuff is quite finnicky. Today I set the amount of reports to 2, and after 1 report the comment vanished, even though it was still set to public according to my admin screen. Then after refreshing the page, it came back. Not sure what that was about, but I can understand it is confusing.

Please understand that there are quite some “clever” things in this plugin that can also be confusing. For example, you cannot report your own comments. If you are not logged in, your email address is stored in a cookie after posting a comment. That way you can also be recognized as author and the report link might not show up.
So if you test, use a different browser then what you posted the comment with, or use privacy/incognito mode.
Also, if you have moderate_comments capability, there is no point in reporting, you can already refuse comments. So if you are logged in as admin, you want see the report link either.
Is it possible for you to try again with different browsers?

Also, the comment section with replies is indeed quite flat.
I added this CSS which made it slightly better, but for real improvement it needs a lot of work:

#commentpost ol.commentlist li.comment ul li {
    background: transparent none;
    border-top: 1px solid #ccc;
    margin: 9px 0 0 0;
    border-left: 1px solid #ddd;
}

This CSS rule is already there at line 541 of style.css. You might be better off adding this to the customizer or using a plugin like Simple Custom CSS.

Hi Marcel,

My apologies. My experiences with this forum is that usually most plugin authors respond in a pattern same as when they first respond a thread. Since you responded my original post very quickly, by autopilot i jumped into a premature conclusion that that’s your way of responding – respond quickly, which is certainly my mistake. I apologize for making you feel being pushed a bit.

Thank you for testing the plugin with my theme. I’ve been working on this site for about 3 years so I got this theme about 2+ years ago. I understood it’s not maintained but over thses 2+ years, whenever I have questions or need some customization codes, the theme author normally would help me so I have got all these customization done for my site and I feel insecure to change theme now because the new theme author may or may not be as helpful as this theme author. But at the same time, I also feel insecure to keep an unmaintained theme for security concern. Additionally, if I change theme now, I dont know how much time it will take me to finish the migration of my entire site content since it’s getting bigger now. And all the cusimization works I need to satrt all over again with the new author.

Do you have any recommendation on themes for membership site?

I don”t have any caching plugin but I think my host does have Varnish.

” Then after refreshing the page, it came back. Not sure what that was about, but I can understand it is confusing.”

To me, the Report Comment button never came back no matter how many tiems I’ve refreshed the screen, which browser I tried on, or which user role I tried it as. Clicking on it once and they’re gone, never came back.

”Also, if you have moderate_comments capability, there is no point in reporting, you can already refuse comments. So if you are logged in as admin, you want see the report link either.”

For a medium to high volume site, to have to worry and read every single report is unrealistic because I still have other tasks on site to watch and supervise. The point of having moderation and minimum # of reports to reach a moderation (and to receive email notification) is to only worry about trouble comments when more than 1 (or whatever # we set) user report on them. Sometimes it may even be an user accidentally click on it when they really want to do is to clickc on Reply. But if the button disappears after the 1st click, the whole point of having the report / moderation setup is lost, resulting in a significant amount of waste time.

And the button is way too close to the Reply button. When on mobile, it’s literally impossible to touch on Reply without also toucing on Report Ccomment. Can we at least separate these two buttons a bit further away from each other?

”Is it possible for you to try again with different browsers?”
Whenever working on my site, I always have 3 browsers open at the same time, chrome, firefox and edge. So I already did that before posting the question here. Thank you for reminding.

And thank you for the CSS codes. i appreciate that.

I hope you don’t mind I ask – you don’t sound like you’re the author of this plugin. So I’m just wondering what’s your role to this plugin?

Sorry making this too long. I’ll stop here.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by wpmember11.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by wpmember11.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by wpmember11.

Hi, no problem. Your return is quite good ??
Sometimes people here get a bit demanding. Thanks for coming back, it’s no issue.

I am not the original author of this plugin. It went unmaintained and I forked it. There were some tricky bugs to fix, and I don’t really like this code (sorry).
So I am not the author of the original plugin, but the current maintainer of this fork.

I don’t understand why it doesn’t show you the report button again. If you did use a different browser with no cookies on that domain, then I just don’t know.
What happens if you go to settings and set it to 3 instead of 2. Does it then work 2 times?
If that is a “solution” that you can live with, that might be good.
I cannot reproduce it here, so I cannot fix it either.

If your host uses Varnish then there is caching. Caching can be quite dificult and confusing, because you never get to the PHP, you just get the html page from the Varnish cache. I have no idea how that affects cookies, if every visitor gets the same cookies or something.
Is there a way to check in your Inspector what cookies you have set? Also after another browser has reported a comment only once. I do suspect that is where the issue is.

And I am sorry, I don’t know good themes for other people. Mostly I just build a custom theme. In that sense, there is probably no problem to keep using this theme. Just that new development will be done by yourself then.

This code should work for you:

a.comment-reply-link {
    margin: 0 10px 0 0;
}

If caching is indeed the problem, you could look into Crowd Control.
That plugin is unmaintained as well I think, but everything happens in JavaScript. It is not just a fork, but also a rewrite (and then abandoned). It didn’t work for me and the project I needed it for, so I forked this. But it might work for you.

Hi Marcel,

Thanks again for the reply. I assume the CSS code is for separating Reply and Report Comment but for some reason did not work. I tried Crowd Control and it behaved exactly the same way as Zeno. I also tried 3 reports for a moderation and the Report Comment button still disappear after just 1 click, and never reappeared.

I think maybe this is sufficicent testing for this plugin for now. I was able to find some CSS codes from my previous version of the same site to improve the looks of comment form. so that’s a relief.

Thank you for your help. I really apprecaited .

As an education for me, you used the word ”fork” a lot, whhich I dont understand. Can you tell me what fork is? Thanks

Sorry, I cannot help you any further. I don’t know where the bug is in your situation, since I cannot reproduce it.
Is there a way you can contact your hosting provider and ask if this can be related to caching?

The plugin Safe Report Comments was written by some people. It has gone unmaintained however.
I would like to maintain it, but I have no access to that plugin. I can copy it and rename it and upload it as Zeno Report Comments.
The people from Crowd Control did the same thing. They rewrote a large part, but then decided to not maintain it anymore.
I only wanted to fix bugs and maybe add some features. I don’t like the code much, but I hope I don’t have to fix too many bugs anymore.
I did spot one though. And it is also a bit curious where after one report, the button doesn’t show up (and contaminates cache?) and then again shows up on a page refresh.

Forking basically means taking a Free Software project, copying it, and continue maintanance of it.
Many big stories are available, like the GCC and the EGCS fork, which later became the main GCC again.
There is also OpenOffice that went to Oracle. Many people were unhappy and forked it into LibreOffice, which is now seeing most of the development.
The same is somewhat true of MySQL and MariaDB.

Thank you again.

No worry. I suddenly remembered I had an abandoned site with my old host so I tested on that site and the button did not disappear after just 1 click. So I think that means it’s most probably a server issue. However, if you want to (that is you don’t have to) I found one new problem, that is the same user can report the same post twice so that would be a problem.

If you’re up to the challenge to fix the bug, thta’s great. If not, this is just for your information.

Thank yoou and have a great weekend ??

Thank you, that is helpfull. So it is something on the server.

Did you test in incognito mode? When you report a comment, that comment ID is saved in a cookie. In incognito mode that cannot happen.

no, not in incognito. Thank you.