After the stable release, I continued working on Commentail. For 1.1.0, I focused on moderation: handling several messages at once, navigating the queue and confirming actions that cannot be undone.
Moderating several comments at once
You can now select several comments in the list and approve, reject, hide, restore or erase their text in one action. The number of selected messages appears above the list, and you can clear the selection. If an action is unavailable, the interface explains which status or permission is missing.
Before applying an action, the server checks the entire selection again. If even one selected comment is no longer eligible or you no longer have access to it, the whole operation is cancelled. In that case, no audit entries or email jobs are saved either.
I added a separate confirmation step for permanently erasing text, both for individual comments and for groups. The page shows how many messages the action will affect. You can cancel and return to the list. Confirming erases the text of the selected comments and their revisions, while leaving replies in place.
Returning to the same list
Search, filters and the page number are now preserved when you open a comment and return to the list. This also works after moderation, a decision on an author’s edit, an email retry or erasure confirmation. You no longer need to rebuild the same selection after every action.
Filters are grouped by site and page, status and dates. Settings, the email queue and permissions are collected in a shared “Management” menu available throughout Commentail. The main actions and returning to results work without JavaScript.
Staff in discussions and email notifications
Staff names can now be highlighted with color. Superusers have a gold name badge and a small crown on their avatar. Highlighting is enabled by default, but you can disable it separately for each site.
I also changed the optional publication notifications. These emails are now queued after a moderator approves a pending comment or an author’s edit. If a comment is published immediately, no separate notification is sent to its author. Guest email verification, editing links and direct-reply notifications work as before. Emails already in the queue before the upgrade are retained.
How to upgrade
Commentail 1.1.0 is available on PyPI. Environment requirements and the documented 1.x compatibility policy have not changed. This website already runs the new version.
Before upgrading, make a backup and test the upgrade on a test copy of your site. After installing the package, apply migrations, collect static files and restart the application and email queue worker using your server’s usual procedure. This version includes a migration for the staff highlighting setting; existing comments are retained.
If you override comment or admin templates, check them separately: your markup still takes precedence, so new elements may require template updates. The full upgrade procedure and changes are in the release notes.
If you try the update and find a bug, open an issue describing what happened and how to reproduce it.
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