[wp-hackers] Comments display contribution -- fuzzy on protocol

[Brian Dupuis]

Hello,

    I'm fuzzy on the protocol for contributing possible patches for 
adding functionality to WordPress. I truly don't know what's best... 
posting a message to this mailing list? Filing a "bug" on Mosquito along 
with patch files? Badger Matt/Ryan incessantly until they answer? I 
assume there's no access to checkins into the SVN repository for those 
of us not in the development team though I have never tried. So, I'll 
ask the hackers here along with information about my addition.

    One thing that's seemed lacking in the management is viewing 
comments, especially now with the possibility of "spam" comments that 
are effectively invisible in the admin interface. I've had several 
comments sit invisibly in the database for weeks that were legitimate 
but inadvertently chose the wrong word to say and wind up in the spam 
list. Yes, I could correct this by being more selective in my word 
lists, but even so there is no clean method of viewing those comments 
even if you want to without resorting to phpMyAdmin or its ilk.

    So, I've modified the edit-comments.php form to display those spam 
comments. They are displayed in a particularly malevolent shade of red 
-- with alternating colors as is done for the standard colors -- to 
denote their spam status.

    The second modification is providing a way to access all of the 
comments using the built-in but currently unused $offset parameter to 
page through the comments. With my plugins and the support questions 
therein, I often get 17 or 18 comments a day meaning that if I'm not 
keeping up I quickly get behind and lose the ability to see those 
comments easily. This ability to hop through pages seems to be a good 
answer to that.

    You can see a screen shot of my admin interface with the changes in 
action here (apologies for the language... that's life with comment 
spammers):

http://www.coldforged.org/images/neweditform.png

    And SVN patch files for edit-comments.php and wp-admin.css are 
available in this zip file:

http://www.coldforged.org/spam-comments.zip

    Is there a more accepted way of doing this kind of proposal?

    Regards,
    Brian "ColdForged" Dupuis