Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

By default, when you look at the list of comments on your WP Admin dashboard, you get a list like this:

On that list, if you click on the IP address of the commenter, you go to all comments by that IP, but if you click on the email you get a mailto link, to let you email the person. That’s great, but as my friend, and fellow fansite runner, Liv pointed out, a lot of people post from multiple IP addresses these days, but only one email. What she wanted was for the icon that gave you the number of approved comments to link to that person’s approved comments.

Me, being the sort to poke around, decided to see if that could be done. I already knew how to filter columns and tables, after all. What I learned was that there actually isn’t a filter for those columns, and the only way around it was to replace it. This means I was going to have to rebuild everything, and in doing so, I wanted that email address to be a link to the search. While annoying, it was pretty easy:

<?php
/*
	Plugin Name: Easy Comment Search By Email
	Description: Changes the default link for emails in the comment lists from mailto links to search results for that address.
	Author: Mika A Epstein (ipstenu)
	Author URI: https://halfelf.org

Credit: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/83769/hook-to-edit-an-column-on-comments-screen
 */

class ecsbePlugin {

	public function __construct() {
		add_action( 'admin_head' , array( &$this, 'column_style') );

	add_filter( 'manage_edit-comments_columns', function($columns) {
		unset($columns["author"]);
		$columns_one = array_slice($columns,0,1);
		$columns_two = array_slice($columns,1);
		$columns_one["author-new"] = "Author";
		$columns = $columns_one + $columns_two;
		return $columns;
	});

	add_filter( 'manage_comments_custom_column', function($column, $column_id) {
		
		global $comment_status;
				$author_url = get_comment_author_url();
					if ( 'http://' == $author_url )
							$author_url = '';
					$author_url_display = preg_replace( '|http://(www\.)?|i', '', $author_url );
					if ( strlen( $author_url_display ) > 50 )
							$author_url_display = substr( $author_url_display, 0, 49 ) . '…';
	
					echo "<strong>"; comment_author(); echo '</strong><br />';
					if ( !empty( $author_url ) )
							echo "<a title='$author_url' href='$author_url'>$author_url_display</a><br />";
	
					if ( current_user_can( 'edit_posts' ) ) {
						$author_email = get_comment_author_email();
					
							if ( !empty( $author_email ) ) {
									echo '<a href="edit-comments.php?s=';
									echo $author_email;
									echo '&mode=detail';
						   		if ( 'spam' == $comment_status )
									echo '&comment_status=spam';
								echo '">';
								echo $author_email;
								echo '</a><br />';
							}
							
							echo '<a href="edit-comments.php?s=';
							comment_author_IP();
							echo '&mode=detail';
							if ( 'spam' == $comment_status )
									echo '&comment_status=spam';
							echo '">';
							comment_author_IP();
							echo '</a>';
					}
		
		}, 10, 2 );

	}

 	public function column_style() {
		echo '<style type="text/css">
			#comments-form .fixed .column-author-new {
				width: 20%;
			}
		 </style>';
	}

}

new ecsbePlugin();

The plugin needs a way better name, though, because this is just … bad. The array slice in the beginning was to remove the first item and replace it, without having to do a lot of overly wrought arguing with possible columns.

That said, this is the sort of thing I may submit a patch for in core, since IPs change a heckuvalot more now, and while that’s a great way to find some serial-accounts and sockpuppets, sorting by email helps you find people being trolls. Both would be good, and I don’t think a lot of us email people. If anything, I’d change the author NAME to be a mailto link.

Food for thought.

I run a fan site, and so does a friend of mine. Liv and I were chatting about wishlists in WordPress for fansites, and she mentioned this:

I also like seeing who has linked to my site from other WP blogs because that helps me create fandom connections with other bloggers. I wish there was a quick button I could hit that would allow me to email those bloggers with a quick note of thanks for the connection

When you’re running a fan website, communicating and connecting with those other sites is a killer feature. We network and that’s how we make our communities bloom, after all, since most of us can’t afford a budget for ‘real’ advertising, and it’s probably not entirely legal for us to do that anyway. So outside of spending days tracking everyone down, what about using the power of ping-backs for ourselves?

I’m sure Liv has an unshakable confidence in my ability to code her things (and I love the requests she makes, they stretch my brain) but this one kicked my patootie a lot. Getting a list of pingbacks isn’t all that hard. There’s a plugin called Commenter Emails by Scott, which nicely lists all the email addresses used to make comments. Using that logic, it’s pretty easy to list all the pingbacks. I mean, hey, we can already do that!

If you go to /wp-admin/edit-comments.php?s&comment_status=all&comment_type=pings you’ll see all your pings:

Just looking at that, however, made me notice a horrible problem. There are no emails listed in pingbacks. This makes perfect sense. The emails aren’t (generally) listed on a page that links to your site. That means without doing some serious site-scraping, there’s no way to get that email.

Putting that aside, the other option is to, perhaps, list the ‘parent’ domain that pinged you. So I went back to Scott’s plugin and forked it into this:

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Pingers List
License: GPLv2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
Description: List all pingbacks with links to their main domain.

	Quasi fork of http://wordpress.org/plugins/commenter-pings/

	Copyright (c) 2007-2014 by Scott Reilly (aka coffee2code)
	Copyright (c) 2014 by Mika Epstein (aka ipstenu)
*/

defined( 'ABSPATH' ) or die();

if ( is_admin() && ! class_exists( 'PingersList' ) ) :

class PingersList {

	private static $plugin_basename = '';
	private static $plugin_page     = '';

	/**
	 * Returns version of the plugin.
	 *
	 * @since 2.1
	 */
	public static function version() {
		return '2.2.1';
	}

	/**
	 * Constructor
	 */
	public static function init() {
		self::$plugin_basename = plugin_basename( __FILE__ );

		// Register hooks
		add_action( 'admin_menu', array( __CLASS__, 'admin_menu' ) );
		add_action( 'admin_menu', array( __CLASS__, 'do_init' ), 11 );
	}

	/**
	 * Initialize hooks and data
	 */
	public static function do_init() {
		// Currently empty
	}

	/**
	 * Query database to obtain the list of commenter email addresses.
	 * Only checks comments that are approved, have a author email, and are
	 * of the comment_type 'comment' (or '').
	 *
	 * Only one entry is returned per email address.  If a given email address
	 * has multiple instances in the database, each with different names, then
	 * the most recent comment will be used to obtain any additional field data
	 * such as comment_author, etc.
	 *
	 * @param array $fields  The fields to obtain from each comment
	 * @param string $output (optional) Any of ARRAY_A | ARRAY_N | OBJECT | OBJECT_K constants. See WP docs for wpdb::get_results() for more info
	 * @return mixed List of email addresses
	 */
	public static function get_pings( $fields = array(  'comment_post_ID', 'comment_author', 'comment_author_url' ), $output = ARRAY_N ) {
		global $wpdb;

		// comment_author_url must be one of the fields
		if ( ! in_array( 'comment_author_url', $fields ) )
			array_unshift( $fields,  'comment_author_url' );

		$fields = implode( ', ', $fields );
		$sql = "SELECT $fields
				FROM {$wpdb->comments} t1
				INNER JOIN ( SELECT MAX(comment_ID) AS id FROM {$wpdb->comments} GROUP BY comment_author_url ) t2 ON t1.comment_ID = t2.id
				WHERE
					comment_approved = '1' AND
					comment_type = 'pingback'
				GROUP BY comment_author_url
				ORDER BY comment_author_url ASC";
		$pings = $wpdb->get_results( $sql, $output );
		return $pings;
	}


	/**
	 * Creates the admin menu.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public static function admin_menu() {
		add_filter( 'plugin_action_links_' . self::$plugin_basename, array( __CLASS__, 'plugin_action_links' ) );
		// Add menu under Comments
		self::$plugin_page = add_comments_page( __( 'Pinger List', 'pinger-list' ), __( 'Pinger List', 'pinger-list' ),
			apply_filters( 'manage_commenter_pings_options', 'manage_options' ), self::$plugin_basename, array( __CLASS__, 'admin_page' ) );
	}

	/**
	 * Adds a 'Settings' link to the plugin action links.
	 *
	 * @param array $action_links The current action links
	 * @return array The action links
	 */
	public static function plugin_action_links( $action_links ) {
		$settings_link = '<a href="edit-comments.php?page=' . self::$plugin_basename.'" title="">' . __( 'Listing', 'pinger-list' ) . '</a>';
		array_unshift( $action_links, $settings_link );
		return $action_links;
	}

	/**
	 * Outputs the contents of the plugin's admin page.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public static function admin_page() {
		$pings = self::get_pings();
		$pings_count = count( $pings );

		echo '<div class="wrap">';
		echo '<h2>' . __( 'Ping List', 'pinger-list' ) . '</h2>';
		echo '<p>' . sprintf( __( 'There are %s unique ping locations for this site.', 'pinger-list' ), $pings_count ) . '</p>';
		echo '</div>';

			echo '<div class="wrap">';
			echo '<h2>' . __( 'All Pings', 'pinger-list' ) . '</h2>';
			echo '<table padding=2>';
			echo '<tr><th>' . __( 'Post', 'pinger-list' ) . '</th><th>' . __( 'Source', 'pinger-list' ) . '</th><th>' . __( 'Direct Link', 'pinger-list' ) . '</th></tr>';

			foreach ( $pings as $item ) {
			
				$pings_url = parse_url(esc_html( $item[2] ));
				$ping_url = $pings_url[scheme].'://'. $pings_url[host];
			
				echo '<tr width="20%"><td><a href="' . get_permalink( $item[0] ) . '">'. get_the_title($item[0]) .'</a></td>';
				echo '<td width="20%">' . make_clickable($ping_url).'</td>';
				echo '<td><a href="'.esc_html( $item[2] ).'">'. esc_html( $item[1] ) . '</a></td></tr>';
			}

			echo '</table>';
			echo '<p>' . sprintf( __( '%s pings listed.', 'pinger-list' ), $pings_count ) . '</p>';
			echo '</div>';


	}
} // end PingersList

PingersList::init();

endif; // end if ! class_exists()

The plugin’s crazy basic. It simply checks for unique ping sources and lists them. So if the same ‘main’ site links to you 10 times from 10 separate posts, it lists that. Probably a nice tweak would be to order them by domain, list the posts they link to and from where, and have a group by sort of list, but I didn’t get that far into it. Forks welcome, as are full blown plugins!