PHP 8 support?

Hi there,

I understand that, for some reason that completely eludes me, Automattic has dropped all support of IntenseDebate (it’s not even listed as a service/app/plugin on Automattic’s own website).

However, even in 2021, it continues to be useful. Dated, sure, but useful.

A few years ago (not many!), PHP 7 came out, and with it, legacy code started to break down. Someone nice at Automattic silently made whatever was required to get IntenseDebate working again. Yay! But now, PHP 8 is knocking at our doors, and it seems that some functionality that was flagged as ‘deprecated’ under PHP 7, now throws a fatal error under PHP 8:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function create_function() in <WP_PATH>/wp-content/plugins/intensedebate/intensedebate.php:149
Stack trace:
#0 <WP_PATH>/wp-content/plugins/intensedebate/intensedebate.php(2721): id_activate_hooks()
#1 <WP_PATH>/wp-settings.php(388): include_once('...')
#2 <WP_PATH>/wp-config.php(82): require_once('...')
#3 <WP_PATH>/wp-load.php(37): require_once('...')
#4 <WP_PATH>/wp-blog-header.php(13): require_once('...')
#5 <WP_PATH>/index.php(17): require('...')
#6 {main}
  thrown in <WP_PATH>/wp-content/plugins/intensedebate/intensedebate.php on line 149" while reading response header from upstream

This is a classical example, and one that is very easy to fix — see https://sarah-moyer.com/fix-create_function-deprecated-in-wordpress/ (it also links to other possible solutions), or, even better, https://stackoverflow.com/a/52515758/1035977

On line 149 of /wp-content/plugins/intensedebate/intensedebate.php, instead of

                      add_filter( 'option_moderation_notify', create_function( '$a', 'return 0;' ) )
                      add_filter( 'option_comments_notify', create_function( '$a', 'return 0;' ) );

use the following code:

                        add_filter( 'option_moderation_notify', function($a) { return 0; } );
                        add_filter( 'option_comments_notify', function($a) { return 0; } );

Basically, create_function() was a hack introduced in PHP 4 (!!!) to allow PHP to have anonymous functions; it became deprecated under 7.2 and was removed in 8.0, since PHP has closures since 5.3.0 and WordPress is supposed to run only under 5.6+ anyway. create_function() has serious performance issues and, worse than that, it has some security vulnerabilities, since it relies on eval() and is theoretically subject to the same issues as eval(). Eval() is Evil (and that’s from some peer-reviewed academic scientists researching the subject, not random developers with their ‘opinions’!).

So please get rid of it! ??

Thanks in advance!