First, I am running “delete original comments and put everything in the forum”, with original comments (effectively just pingbacks) shown interleaved.  The problem with leaving the duplicates is spam: Akismet and Stop Spammer Registrations can’t catch everything, and if you leave the duplicates you have to delete every spam comment twice — once in WordPress and once in the forums!  So I’m trusting SPF to continue to manage my comment threads for me.

Do you not place your comments into moderation first? They should not get copied across to the forum until approved…?

1. How can I put an RSS link, and a “Subscribe to Comments” link, to the comment thread in each blog post when it’s actually a forum thread?  (Since SPF is moving the comments to the forum and deleting them, the WP comments RSS is always empty.)  Is there a hook for this already?  If not, can I get one?  I know there’s already an RSS for each forum thread, but I don’t know how to get it into the appropriate blog post.

Good questions. And probably, at the end of the day, we would really need to add support in the forum of tags to enable both of these – the latter being subject to having the Simple:Press Subscriptions plugin running and the user viewing the comments having permission on that particular forum to use them. After I post this reply I will add both of these rather smart requests to the development request list for the plugin.

2. Where can I change the default 20-character limit for displayed user names?  I wouldn’t mind bumping this up to 25 or so, as some people (especially those with nicknames) can end up slightly over the limit…

Can you tell me where you are referring to here please? I am unaware of any such restriction…

3. The page title of every forum page and thread is just “Forums”, not the forum or thread title.  How can I change this?  I’m running the latest version of Atahualpa, if that helps.

Forum admin > Components > SEO Settings. Allows for adding/removing items for the page title.

4. It would be very useful to have a “spam words” function, whereby people with certain words in their username (particularly guest users) get their posts held for moderation or banned altogether. 

Yes, WordPress has a similar function, but it’s useless because a. it matches inside words as well as whole words (it can’t reject “seo” for this reason), and b. it matches in the MESSAGE BODY as well as the name!  For instance, anyone whose name contains “Internet”, “hack”, or “cheat” is likely a spammer, but those are perfectly reasonable words to use in the body of a comment.

Thus, I would like a menu function to create a list of spam keywords in the USERNAME ONLY, with separate lists for “match within” and “match only whole word”, and checkboxes to a. check Guest posts for these keywords (post is held for moderation) and b. check account registrations (account is not registered).  Note that the first — checking guest posts — is more important, as that’s how comments come into the system.

Have you had a look to see if there are any WordPress plugins that will do this for you? After all both comments on a blog post and user registrations are both within the province and are functions of WordPress not Simple:Press so tackling this at the source would be preferable.

5. This is more of a wishlist thing, but I was running blog linking way back when pingbacks were munched and turned into guest posts too.  This got fixed by leaving pingbacks in the normal comment system, but I have a bunch that got munched.  I kept the original Pingback emails from that era: can anyone help me out and write a script to convert the emails back into actual pingbacks in the WP database?

Would you be able to put the emails into a cohesive format – such as a comma delimited list for example? Emails can be very difficult to deal with and to extract the data from…

Do you not place your comments into moderation first? They should not get copied across to the forum until approved…?

I have an active user community (some posts have 400+ comments over 3+ years), and I’ve found by experience that holding all comments for moderation stops all discussions dead in their tracks.  I’d rather deal with deleting spam than throttle the interactivity.

…probably, at the end of the day, we would really need to add support in the forum of tags to enable both of these – the latter being subject to having the Simple:Press Subscriptions plugin running and the user viewing the comments having permission on that particular forum to use them. After I post this reply I will add both of these rather smart requests to the development request list for the plugin.

I *think* what you’re saying is that you don’t want people to get the RSS feed to a forum they’re not allowed to read, so I’d need “Guests” to have read permission on the comment threads. (Which I do, as to do otherwise would be nonsensical…obviously I’m also running the plugin because I have the forum RSS buttons already.) Correct?

I note that there is already a “topic RSS” button on every forum thread that is available to everyone, guests included. All I need is for the link to that button to be available in the article (or its header/footer/etc.) via a tag…

This seems like an important feature to have in general, so I’m glad you’re looking at it.  Thank you!

Can you tell me where you are referring to here please? I am unaware of any such restriction…

When WP comments get turned into forum posts (“guest” posts, obviously) the name on the post gets truncated at, I think, 20 characters.  I can easily change a constant in a PHP file, I just need to know where that happens.

Forum admin > Components > SEO Settings. Allows for adding/removing items for the page title.

Hmmm. I checked “Overwrite page/browser title with ours” (unchecked before) and it has no effect.  See: gnolls.org/forums

Have you had a look to see if there are any WordPress plugins that will do this for you? After all both comments on a blog post and user registrations are both within the province and are functions of WordPress not Simple:Press so tackling this at the source would be preferable.

I haven’t seen any, which is why I asked…but that’s a good point that it might be better accomplished at the WP plugin level.  Shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’m not a web developer and I’ve never tried to make a WP plugin before!

Would you be able to put the emails into a cohesive format – such as a comma delimited list for example? Emails can be very difficult to deal with and to extract the data from…

Most likely.  Worst case I can create the comma-delimited list by hand, as there are only maybe 100-200 of them.  (I’ll have to delete the munched trackbacks that got imported into the forums by hand anyway…)

My two highest priorities would be the comment RSS tag, and figuring out why the SEO settings aren’t doing what we expect. Thank you for your time!

First off I apologise for missing the 20 character limit on guest name. I have opened a ticket here to discuss making this bigger. If we do then should be able to get that in the next update (5.5.1) to core SP.

On the SEO/page title issue there is a possibility that your WordPress theme is blocking the SP settings. Some themes override the standard WP API call which makes changing the data impossible. The way to check this is to briefly switch your site to use the WP Default theme and then see if the SP settings then become active.