It has been a bumper week for plugins, scripts and snippets this week based on items i’ve seen in communities and this one is no different I saw a post in the Sure crafted Facebook group that caught my eye and the face that this ability wouldn’t be native for a few more versions made it worth looking at fixing this pain point.
So the issue Sure Dash notifications for comments in communities to moderators not just the site admin, isn’t natively currently possible and this was causing some issues now one solution is to use Flowmattic or Otto kit to automate a work flow on comments to send those emails.
No i’ve written extensively about sure products and how customisable they are and the reason this is is because where it exists they use core and by this i mean if they can hook into what is WordPress native they will and Sure Dash is no different at all, the comment system for the community is WordPress native and its built on comments and as such you get a comment notification when a new comment is made.
WordPress native is always best
The community is based on custom post types and again this means we can specifically target the custom post type and look for comments to it and it alone, in addition the management of these comments is again native its built in to user capabilities and specifically the core moderate_comments, in the normal role types this is editor or above.
So we now have the pieces we need to look for the post type community-post and we then need to be able to notify people with moderate_comments and now we need a trigger but because its WordPress native we know that trigger already its comment_post so we now have our building blocks.
Add in a small admin screen in discussions (because where else would it go its native WordPress) and by default once installed every user with moderate comments ability will get an email when a sure dash community-post has a comment that needs moderation now base admin will get two one from Moddash and one from WordPress so I would suggest you disable the WordPress one.
Notifications are not Instant
ModDash notifications are not instant there is a 15 second cron to allow user experience not to suffer as otherwise when they post there comment all the action hooks would need to finish firing (all emails sent) before they are posted and this would make a horrible user experience as with a few moderators it would be slow in a really large community it will be very slow and a poor user experience.
So we get round this by firing the action hook and adding a cron, this will then fire and send the notifications this should negate the issue on larger communities and keep comment posting almost immediately.
This did introduce an issue with nuances which are now generated by cron system user 0 rather than any WordPress user so when you click a link if you have the ability to moderate_comments it will generate you a new nuance, to get around this issue if not you will get a warning.
Mod-Dash Settings
In Modash we have a few options we can setup as we can see from the image below, the first is select which moderators should get the notification this is a multi-select block and by default ALL will get an email but you can modify this to only those you wish even though they all have the moderate_comments ability.
The email you will receive will be mobile friendly and allow you to action the comment and if you are not already logged into the site you can login and still action it thanks to the new nuance generation
What notifications look like?
Now in addition to email you also have the ability to add a slack notification and a slack notification supports componants and as such aslso has buttons
Where as discord only supports buttons through bots but you get nice links to follow instead
Now ModDash is avaliable for free and is avaliable from reallyusefulplugins.com at https://reallyusefulplugins.com/plugins/moddash-notifier/
