Approving comments

By default, all comments are marked as approved. Optionally, you can let the admins of your application manually approve comments. The admins will get a notification for each comment that is posted. That notification will contain links to approve or reject the comment.

##Preparation

First, you must set the automatically_approve_all_comments config option to false.

// config/comments.php

return [
    // ...
    
    /*
     * Comments need to be approved before they are shown. You can opt
     * to have all comments to be approved automatically.
     */
    'automatically_approve_all_comments' => false,
]

Next, you must pass a callable to PendingCommentNotification::sendTo(). The callable will receive the $comment that is pending, and it should return the users that should receive the notification to approve/reject it.

// typically, in a service provider

PendingCommentNotification::sendTo(function(Comment $comment) {
    return User::where('is_admin', true)->get(); // select some users
});

Finally, you must register the routes used to approve/reject a comment.

// in a routes file

Route::comments();

##Determining if a comment should be automatically approved

If you set automatically_approve_all_comments in the comments config file to true then all new comments will need to be approved.

Optionally, you can make this more fine-grained. Imagine that you only want to approve comments for users that are less then three months in your system.

To get started, you must use a custom Comment model. Create a class of your own and let it extend Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment.

use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

class CustomComment extends Comment
{
    // ...
}

Next, you must register that custom comment class in the comments config file.

// config/comments.php

return [
    'models' => [
        'comment' => CustomComment::class
    ],
]

With that in place, you can now add a method shouldBeAutomaticallyApproved to the model that will contain the logic to determine if a comment should be approved.

use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

class CustomComment extends Comment
{
    public function shouldBeAutomaticallyApproved(): bool
    {
   
        // $this->commentator is the user that created the comment
        if ($this->commentator->created_at->diffInMonths() < 3) {
            return false;
        }

        // automatically approve the comment is the user that
        // created the comment can also approve it
        return $this->getApprovingUsers()->contains($currentUser);
    }
}

Let's take a look at another example. You might want to only automatically approve comments if they don't contain certain words.

use Illuminate\Support\Str;
use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

class CustomComment extends Comment
{
    public function shouldBeAutomaticallyApproved(): bool
    {
        if (Str::contains($this->original_text, [
            'bad-word', 
            'another-bad-word'
        ])) {
            return false;
        }
   
        return $this->getApprovingUsers()->contains($currentUser);
    }
}

##Sending and customizing the approval notification

When a new comment is made that should be approved, the PendingCommentNotification is sent to the users returned by the closure passed to PendingCommentNotification::sendTo. That notification will have links to approve/reject a comment.

By default, the notification will be a mail which looks like this.

##Customizing the notification

The sender email and name can of the mail can be changed in the notifications.mail key of the comments config file.

If you want to customize the content of the sent mail, you can publish the views. The mail view will be published at /resources/views/vendor/comments/mail/pendingCommentNotification.blade.php.

To customize the notification class itself, you can create a notification of your own that extends Spatie\Comments\Notifications\PendingCommentNotification. You must update the notifications.notifications.pending_comment value of the comments config file, with the name of your class.

To get full control over what should happen when a new pending comment is submitted, you can override the actions.send_notifications_for_pending_comment key in the comments config file.

##Approving a comment via code

To approve a comment via code, you can simply call approve() on a comment.

use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

$comment = \Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment::find($commentId);

$comment->approve();

##Determining if a comment is approved

You can determine if a comment is approved with isApproved() and isPending()

$comment = $post->comment('a new comment');

$comment->isPending(); // returns true
$comment->isApproved(); // returns false

$comment->approve();

$comment->isPending(); // returns false
$comment->isApproved(); // returns true

##Scoping on approved comments

The Comment model has a scope to filter approved and pending comments.

use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

Comment::approved()->get(); // returns all approved comments
Comment::pending()->get(); // returns all comments that haven't been approved yet