Question about approving a comment to our article

The article “Improvements to Fedora Docs” got 2 comments until now and I being one of the authors got an email 'Please moderate “improvements …” ’ and links to either approve, trash or spam it.

I followed the links, tried to “approve” and “apply”, but nothing changes. One of the pages told me that I’m not entitled to modify (or edit?) the page.

Now I wonder, am I too stupid or am I missing something or is this mail for moderation a mishap?

Anyway, these comments are waiting for moderation for hours now. This is a bit unfortunate. I would like to help, but what can I do if any?

Hi Peter.

There are multiple known problems.

  1. The “Authors” are supposed to be able to approve comments and the last time I checked the permissions, the box was checked in WordPress that appears to indicate that people in that role should be allowed to approve them. But several people have reported that they cannot approve comments. I don’t know what the problem is. It might be because there is some other permissions dependency that is blocking something or it might be because the system doesn’t work well with the third-party authentication plugin or any number of other things. I’ll have to spend some time investigating it someday. But I don’t really expect that I’ll be able to do much about it since I’m pretty sure both Ben Cotton and Paul Frields have looked at the issue before.
  2. The editors are supposed to change the role for new contributors from the default “Contributor” to “Author” when they publish their first article. It looks like this was overlooked for your account. I’ve corrected this and your account should now be in the “Author” role. (You might have to logoff+login and/or clear some caches or cookies to get the changes to show up.)
  3. The editors are also supposed to keep an eye on the comments and approve them from time to time. But there are only two of us these days and my schedule has been such that I have not been able to keep as close an eye on them as I’d like. Ideally, there would be a few more editors (in more disparate time zones) watching for new comments.

With some luck you might be able to approve comments now. (Some people sometimes seem to be able to when they are in the “Author” role.) Please give it another try the next time you see a new comment.

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I had already guessed something like that. Therefore, it would certainly be good if the authors could take over this work. After all, they have to read the contributions and react anyway. I will try it at the next opportunity and with new login.

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