Never Moderate Registered Users

3.0 (2026-06-19)

Highlights:

This recommended major release adds a setting to enable only trusting privileged users, requires stricter trust for open registration sites, adds an action that fires when the plugin overrides comment approval, disables handling of programmaticly created comments (CLI, import, etc), namespaces and restructures the plugin code, notes compatibility through WP 7.0+, drops compatibility with versions of WP older than 6.0, bumps minimum PHP support to 8.0, and more.

Details:

• Change: Don’t consider the default role on open registration sites as trusted
  • When open registration is enabled, require a minimum capability above the site’s default role before bypassing moderation or spam checks
  • Closed registration sites are unaffected
• New: Add c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_open_registration_caps filter to customize open registration trust requirements
• New: Add “Trust only privileged users” checkbox to Settings > Discussion
  • Requires the publish_posts or moderate_comments capability before bypassing moderation or spam checks
  • Replaces default trust behavior, including the open registration minimum capability, when enabled
• New: Add c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_privileged_caps filter to customize privileged user capabilities
• New: Add c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_auto_approved action that fires when a comment is auto-approved by the plugin
• Change: Limit auto-approval
  • Process front-end and authenticated REST API requests (as always)
  • Now ignore import, CLI, cron, and other programmatic creation without a session; default WP handling will apply
• Change: Ensure the comment’s user_id matches the logged-in user
• New: Add function to get the version of the plugin
• Fix: Correctly check for user existence
• Change: Reorganize plugin into namespaced classes under includes/
  • Trust_Policy for capability and trust logic
  • Comment_Moderator for the pre_comment_approved filter
  • Admin_Settings for the Discussion settings UI
  • Hooks and Options for hook and option name constants
• Change: Remove global helper functions and function_exists() guards
• Change: Use exit instead of die() when bailing on direct file invocation
• Change: Tweak extended description in readme.txt
• Change: Document that c2c_never_moderate_registered_users_approved may run twice per front-end submission since WP 6.7
• Change: Note compatibility through WP 7.0+
• Change: Drop compatibility for WordPress versions older than 6.0
• Change: Require at least PHP 8.0+ and note compatibility through PHP 8.5+
• Change: Add ‘Requires at least’ and ‘Requires PHP’ headers to main plugin file
• Change: Update copyright date (2026)
• Change: Remove unused global
• Change: Fix minor documentation typos or omissions

2.3.6 (2025-04-14)

• Change: Note compatibility through WP 6.8+
• Change: Note compatibility through PHP 8.3+
• Change: Update copyright date (2025)

2.3.5 (2024-08-21)

• Change: Shorten plugin description
• Change: Note compatibility through WP 6.6+
• Change: Update copyright date (2024)
• Change: Reduce number of ‘Tags’ from readme.txt
• Change: Remove development and testing-related files from release packaging

Full changelog is available in CHANGELOG.md.