Comment-admin problem on WordPress

A trivial but annoying intermittent admin-problem on WordPress that’s affecting this weblog.

Since the last WordPress auto-update here, comments-administration has gone a bit erratic. It now sends me emails to two addresses, even though I can only change one of them – which kind of suggests there’s part of an old configuration still sitting out there somewhere, inaccessible but still being used and clashing with the current one.

I’ve no idea how to fix it, but it’s relatively trivial: it doesn’t stop anything working, it’s just a background annoyance. But it does seem to affect comments-moderation and auto-approval – and that does impact people other than just me.

What’s supposed to happen is that anyone who’s already gone through moderation once and been approved to post is then allowed to post further comments without going through admin-moderation. What’s actually happening at the moment is that, erratically, under some kind of internal rules that I can’t yet discern, WordPress sometimes decides that even regular commenters here have never been here before, and pushes their latest comment onto the moderation-stack. Which is annoying, for everyone. Yet, at the moment, outside of my control. Sorry… 🙁

If you post a comment here, and you suddenly find that your comment goes for moderation instead, it isn’t me that’s blocking it – honest! (I’ve only ever blocked two previously-‘approved’ people from commenting on this blog, in both cases from urgent necessity, as you’d recognise if you saw the respective comments… 🙁 ) Nothing’s changed as such: so please bear with me while I find out how to fix this?

A particular apology to Peter Bakker, Nick Malik, Anthony Draffin and any others who’ve been affected by this – please do keep posting those comments, I really do appreciate them!

Apologies again – and many thanks for your patience, anyway.