Approve a backlog of genuine comments in bulk

A moderation queue that piled up over a slow month is its own kind of chore. Somewhere in there are real readers waiting on you, but they are buried next to the junk, and approving them one at a time in the dashboard is the sort of task you keep pushing to next week.

This is the counterpart to clearing spam. Instead of emptying the queue, it finds the genuine comments and gets them live, with you approving the list first.

Go through the comment moderation queue on this site. Do not approve anything
yet. First, read everything that is pending and hand me back a plain list:
who left it, which post it is on, and the first line of the comment. Sort the
ones that look like real reader comments to the top, and flag anything that
reads like spam separately so I can deal with it on its own.

Then show me the batch of genuine comments you want to approve and wait for me
to say go. Only after I approve, mark those live. If the queue is long, work in
small batches and show me each one before it goes through. When you are done,
list every comment you approved and the post it is on.

Why this is safe to run

The first move is a read. Pulling the moderation queue changes nothing, so you see the whole list, sorted and spam-flagged, before anything happens. Approving is a separate ability, and it only fires on the comments you named.

Every approval is reversible. The ability that approves a comment is the same one that can unapprove, spam, or trash it, so a wrong call is a second sentence, not a mess to clean up. On top of that, comment moderation stays off until you switch it on, every call is checked against the moderate-comments capability of the user you bound the agent to, and each approval lands in the Activity Log with the comment it touched.

Already connected? Skip the paste. Ask your agent for the “approve a backlog of genuine comments” recipe, or just tell it to clear the real comments out of moderation, and it runs the same review-first flow on your own site.