Did you realize that WordPress comments can only have 4 statuses?
- Approved
- Not approved/Pending
- Spam
- Trash
For most use cases, this works well. But …
… what if I wanted to have another status …
… which is none of the above?
For security reasons, the comments don’t automatically get published on my site, but need to be reviewed and approved by me. I’m not strict at all, I just like to prevent spam from appearing on my site.
Once I received a comment, which was not really a comment and it wasn’t spam either. Someone wanted to get in touch with me and, for lack of a better option, sent a message through the comment form at the end of one of my posts.
Just like other comments, it appeared on the dashboard. I checked it and replied to it in the form of an email. I didn’t want to delete it for whatever reason, but I also didn’t want it sitting there in the list with other real comments. Plus the little bubble telling me that I had one unapproved comment was really annoying me every time I logged in.
After a while, it was driving me nuts. I had to do something about it.
While comments in WordPress look like a custom post type, they are much more limited. In a fit of rage curiosity, I started poking at the code and the WordPress documentation, while my brain was trying to nail down what I really wanted. I wanted an option to archive comments.
After some more poking, a few cups of coffee, and a pinch of AI – you just cannot escape AI these days – I had a working solution. Yay!
It doesn’t do much, but it is also not supposed to.
- It allows you to archive or unarchive selected comments.
- It adds a separate submenu, which lists the archive comments.
- The archived comments do not show up in the main comments list.
If this is something you’d like to try, you can download it from the product page for free, or you can check out the GitHub repository.
If you have any comments or ideas, let me know in the comments. I promise I will not archive it. 😊
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