Never Moderate Registered Users

This plugin prevents comments from registered users (or, alternatively, those with specified capabilities) from ever going into the moderation queue or getting automatically marked as spam, regardless of the apparent spamminess of the comment.

To be recognized as a registered user, the user must be logged into your site at the time they post their comment. The plugin applies to front-end submissions and authenticated REST API requests only; it does not affect comment imports, CLI tools, cron jobs, or other programmatic creation without a logged-in user.

This plugin assumes that you trust your registered users. It will automatically approve any comment made by registered users, even if the comment stinks of spam. Therefore, it is recommended that you do not allow users to register themselves (uncheck the setting “Anyone can register” in the WordPress admin under Settings -> General).

However, when open registration is enabled, the plugin automatically requires users to have a capability above the site’s default role before their comments bypass moderation or spam checks. For example, when the default role is subscriber, users must have at least the contributor role (which has the edit_posts capability). You can customize this behavior using the ‘c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_open_registration_caps’ filter. See the developer documentation for details.

You can further restrict which users bypass moderation by enabling “Trust only privileged users to bypass comment moderation and spam checks” on the Settings -> Discussion admin page. That setting requires users to be able to publish posts or moderate comments before their comments bypass moderation or spam checks. You can also use the ‘c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_caps’ filter to specify trusted roles and capabilities in custom code. See the FAQ for an example.

This plugin is a partial successor to my now-defunct Never Moderate Admins or Post Author plugin. The primary purpose of that plugin was to prevent admins and the post’s author from being moderated. WordPress eventually integrated that functionality. However, that plugin also allowed you to prevent registered users from being moderated, which is still a valid need not directly facilitated by WordPress, thus this plugin was spun out.

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage

Developer Documentation

Developer documentation can be found in DEVELOPER-DOCS.md. That documentation covers the numerous hooks provided by the plugin. Those hooks are listed below to provide an overview of what’s available.

• c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_open_registration_caps : Customize the capabilities required to bypass moderation when open registration is enabled.
• c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_privileged_caps : Customize the capabilities that identify privileged users when the Discussion setting is enabled.
• c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_caps : Customize the capabilities that are automatically trusted, any one of which a user must have in order to never get moderated.
• c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_approved : Customize granular control for whether a comment by a registered user that would otherwise be moderated or marked as spam should automatically be approved.
• c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_auto_approved : Fires when the plugin auto-approves a comment that would otherwise have been moderated or marked as spam.

Find out more at the plugin’s WordPress Plugin Repository page.

1. Install via the built-in WordPress plugin installer. Or install the plugin code inside the plugins directory for your site (typically /wp-content/plugins/).
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ admin menu in WordPress
3. Optional: Enable “Trust only privileged users to bypass comment moderation and spam checks” on the Settings -> Discussion admin page if you want to limit the feature to users who can publish posts or moderate comments.
4. Optional: Use one or more of the provided hooks in custom code to control specific capabilities that should be exempted from moderation and spam or to control the feature on a comment-by-comment basis.