In reply to Stephen Cronin.

Hi - just an update. I had a really busy week and didn't make much progress on this, but am aiming for next week.

First pass will be to allow users to set the number of approved comments that are needed before auto approving. After that, I'll look at hooking into some other plugins that allow comments to be flagged or commentators put on probation (if there is any demand for that).

The idea would be that my plugin would pick up the signals of the other plugins and use that when deciding whether a comment should be moderated.

For example, I found a plugin that allows people to flag comments and then adjusts the comment_karma field in the db. It would be possible to auto approve comments for authors who have had more than 5 comments (set by user) previously approved, unless they have comments with bad karma, etc, in which they'd have to be moderated. That would give a more complete solution, but the question is whether anyone is interested?

Another plugin I've been looking at tonight is Comment Probation which allows you to put a particular commentator on probation. It's more than 2 years old, but is written by Andrew Nacin and is on the list of plugins available on WordPress.com VIP, so must be solid. It uses the same hook I'm using to prevent comments being moderated, so I just need to make sure they play nicely together.

Incidentally Mika Epstein mentioned Comment Probation today along with some other interesting solutions. Lots happening in this space!