Is it possible to notify the user if akismet put his submitted comment as “awaiting approval”?
I submit the comment via Ajax in WordPress and would just like to display a text message if his comment does not get published right away.
I don’t know if this info can be accessed at all. Have any of you tried this before?
I agree with Jason. GASP exists because my blog was getting over 1000 comments a day Akismet didn’t block. What Akismet did very well was put my regular commenters comments into spam along with the 1000 others.
The day I installed GASP (created by Andy Bailey who also created CommentLuv) it blocked all but 40 comments – which means 960 were left by bots and not blocked by Akismet.
I refuse to moderate comments on any site that doesn’t use GASP and I delete Akismet in every blog I touch. Some bloggers do run both without problems, but then they have to rescue their real comments from spam so I don’t see the benefit.
I would disable Akismet; it’s horrible and discourages commenting. In your WP-Admin, Settings >> Discussion … check off “Before a comment appears” >> “Before a comment appears An administrator must always approve the comment.” Then the user will know his/her comment is awaiting moderation.
But just about every user hates finding out that they have to wait for a moderator to review their comment before it will be published.
Why disable Akismet?
(Recommended) I’d install GrowMap Anti-Spam (GASP) and use that. It’s free and it works. All it does is require the user to click a checkbox, but it’s quite effective. Just look at the reviews. You can read the documentation there, and download it from the .org website.
An alternative would be to consider enabling real-time comments using the SiteBrains WP Plugin for blocking spam, profanity, garbage texts, bots, irrelevant embedded links/spam links, etc. Just download it and install per the instructions.