Back in July of 2009, I wrote about my experience of deleting a field within my database that unknowingly, was important for WordPress to have. The field is called comment_karma. At the time, I had no idea why this field was important to WordPress. Today, I stumbled across an article on True/Slant that explains their use of this particular field with AJAX to curate and filter comments. They provide the code snippets along with explanations as to what the code does.
Comment_karma is a remnant. Much like post_category and link_category used to be. The only difference is that, until recently, there was no way to really get rid of it.
However, now that we have comment meta system, I expect that the comment_karma field will go away. Probably not in 3.0 since we’re close to feature freeze. But probably in 3.1. It’ll likely be replaced by a comment meta of “karma” or similar. Plugins should start taking advantage of the comment meta now, as many of the comment fields are not really necessary any more and probably won’t live long.
@Otto – If you’re a plugin developer and you’re using Comment_karma and it disappears as you say it might to be replaced by comment meta, where would I go to find this information? How would I know about changes like this? I don’t know of a consistent stream of information that comes from close to the vest of the project that goes out to theme/plugin authors. Something like this is a good example.
@Jeffro – There’s no current plan to eliminate it, I simply expect it based on the way things happen… I did make a ticket to this effect, actually, but I suggest deprecating it for a version or two first.
As far as keeping up with changes… if you want to be a serious plugin developer, then I’d get involved in core development as well. Subscribe to the wp-trac mailing lists. Download the trunk SVN and run a local copy which you do an “svn up” on every so often. Give your opinion on trac every once in a while. Contribute a patch or two.
You can’t be a really good WordPress developer without keeping up with and helping out with the core code as well, IMO. There’s no real difference between “plugin” and “core” developers. There’s just “WordPress developers”.
Comment_karma is a remnant.
To my knowledge it has never been used, not even by b2. So it’s not so much a remnant as a “there if you want to use it” thing.
We’ve discussed two possible uses for it over the years. One was using it for an anti-comment-spam system where multiple plugins could bump the karma up or down based on different factors, and the end result could be stored there. This was prior to the concept of storing “spam” comments in the database. Then Akismet came on the scene, and it worked better than open source rulesets, so the idea of a hoard of anti-spam plugins has faded.
The other one way Digg or Slashdot style comment ratings (not for core, but for plugins to use). That seems to be more or less the way True/Slant is using it, albeit with only two levels and editorial control of the ratings.
[…] Use the field “comment_karma” to track moderated comments. Via: WP Tavern […]
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Mark Jaquith told me at WordCamp Miami that this field is there just for stuff like this. I would expect there are at least a couple of plugins taking advantage of it in some way.