The Disqus Blog - Latest Comments in Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jason — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:00:50 -0000

Thanks for the report. The issue with approving posts / marking posts as spam should be fixed now.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:31:03 -0000

I had an approve + blackberry sig block get posted as a reply previously.

Approve alone from Outlook didn't work.

Approve + sig block from blackberry didn't work

Reply worked.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:06:55 -0000

Looks like "delete" worked, but "spam" did not.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Andrew Badr — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:16:17 -0000

Just to clarify, Yokum and Jake: the email you sent in response didn't show up a post, did it?

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:21:01 -0000

I just had a comment from 7:12a today and at 8:45a I replied "Approve". It's now 9:20a and it still hadn't gone live so I manually accepted it.

Clearly something's off here! :)

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:28:32 -0000

Also tried to approve today from Outlook with only the word "Approve" and no sig block. So a reply and approve seems to work, but approve only doesn't seem to work.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:21:43 -0000

Still buggy. I waited 3 hours after trying an approve from my blackberry today. That comment is still in "approve" limbo. However, I was able to instantly approve and reply to another comment (by the same person posting twice, perhaps user error in sending the comment twice?) by replying from Outlook email.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:40:43 -0000

I waited about 3 hours before manually approving. The odd thing was that WP wasn't showing an unapproved comment for me. I'll post again on this chain if I can't get email reply to work properly.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jason — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:31:14 -0000

How long did you wait? I've made some changes that should hopefully fix the issue, but let me know if you're still experiencing this.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:01:25 -0000

Actually I noticed that this new updated didn't work either. I thought it was just taking a while to process and manually approved it. Apparently it wasn't functional?

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:52:42 -0000

Today, I tried to reply via email to approve off a handheld device running Good software. The last time, my sig block after the word approve showed up, which prompted me to ask the original question. This time, the comment doesn't seem to have been approved and is still in unapproved limbo. Running WP 2.6.5.

Also, there isn't an affirmative notice in WP that I have an unapproved comment (i.e. shows up in red next to comments).

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:54:43 -0000

Wonderful. That fixes the email "approve" from a blackberry with an auto-signature and/or the rest of the message in the reply. Thanks for the quick response.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:37:29 -0000

That's fantastic, thanks!

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Andrew Badr — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:05:30 -0000

We've updated the code to accept the command as long as the word is alone on the first line. That should solve the problems you're having, right? The change will be live within an hour.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Yokum — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:37:46 -0000

Can you tweak the code so that "Approve" + "!END" or some tag like that will strip everything else after "Approve" so we don't have to delete the rest of the email and can moderate comments from a blackberry? Or allow users to manually input some key words from an out of office auto reply so that the system understands to not automatically post the auto-reply.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:16:13 -0000

Fair enough. Thanks for adding this to the priority list!

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

obscurelyfamous — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:03:36 -0000

We actually can't link directly to a comment from the admin just yet. I know, it sounds trivial and really lame of us, and I agree. The administration uses a bit of Javascript to make things feel more dynamic, and our implementation has precluded us from doing exactly what everyone needs.

This will change.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Record-Eagle Webmaster — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:49:10 -0000

No... I don't want to approve comments via e-mail, since my office email system is notoriously slow. Also, as Jake points out, you run the risk of getting other text in your approval email (such as an automatic signature or an out-of-office reply) that then gets posted as a reply comment.

What I want is a link in the notification e-mail that takes me to the moderation queue. Here's how Wordpress does it:

[Comment Here]

Approve it: http://blogs.record-eagle.c... [takes you to a page online where you can confirm approval of this comment]
Delete it: http://blogs.record-eagle.c... [takes you to a page online where you can confirm deletion of this comment]
Spam it: http://blogs.record-eagle.c... [takes you to a page online where you can confirm marking this comment as spam]
Currently 3 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
http://blogs.record-eagle.c... [takes you to the moderation queue]

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:47:28 -0000

My opinion:

1. Yes, having a toggle that allows/doesn't allow email replies is genius. I too want drives back to my site on some blogs, don't care on others.

2. "Approve" only currently works IF you've removed all content (another annoying step) from your email or else it posts the entire response, including "approve" as a comment.

3. I don't understand why you guys don't want to add a link directly to the comment I'm getting the email about. Sometimes there's a reason I want to go straight to the admin (follow-up, other admin tasks, etc.) - it's just an addition to the standard email format, why not add? (I've requested this in the past too)

As an admin, these notification emails are a powerful, powerful tool for my management abilities. I'd like to see them far more useful and offering far more options for getting tasks done than we currently see.

Thanks, as always, for the work!

Jake

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

obscurelyfamous — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:22:38 -0000

You can also reply with the word "approve" which does the explicit approve action. Is that what you're looking for?

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Record-Eagle Webmaster — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:12:57 -0000

Well I realized after the fact that the problem in question was not necessarily about approving comments, but just getting notifications and automatically replying to them. But as long as you asked...

My original suggestion was to do away with approval via email response. Why not do what Wordpress does and include a link in the notification email that leads to a webpage where you click "Approve"?

And while we're at it, I'd rather not see replies by email either. As a webmaster, I want someone to come back to my blog site to leave a comment (generates page views for me). Also, as online discussions can often get heated, I think it's too easy to hit reply on an email and whip off a nasty remark. Making people come back to the site not only gives me a page view, but also gives someone time to cool off and think longer about the reply they want to post.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Jake — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:36:54 -0000

Record-Eagle, I wish you'd left that suggestion up. Having links like the wordpress emails is a great idea. I'd love the option be able to a) click straight to the approval from the notification while b) turning off auto-reply/approve

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

Record-Eagle Webmaster — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:53:59 -0000

Oops - ignore that.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

obscurelyfamous — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:45:01 -0000

We're going to try to have a better fix for this in the next couple releases. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Re: Out of Office and Email Approvals?

outsidein — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:38:08 -0000

same problem here. was a big load on other moderators in the office to go in each day and delete my out of office auto-responses. :(