fix: prevent give_payment_note from affecting comment count

[kevcampb]

The give plugin writes in to wp_comments with a comment_type of 'give_payment_note'

These database entires cause problems on the Wordpress Comments section on the admin site, as they appear in the total comment counts, but not show up due to the non-standard comment-type.

I cannot find any documentation on the purpose of these entries, so I'm unclear as to whether they can be deleted safely.

[ravinderk]

@kevcampb
I am unable to reproduce this issue. Please check video for more details:

https://www.useloom.com/share/a3171a16174749a4ad73ed98fde140b4

[kevcampb]

Ravinderk, thanks for taking the time to look at this.

The issue, which is clearly visible in your video, is that there are 2381 comments in total, but only 1 is shown. The others cannot be seem as they are not real comments.

There is a deeper issue here with using the wp_comments table in this way, and it seems likely this will conflict with other plugins or future updates to that table.

[ravinderk]

@kevcampb As I told you this is my dev environment and I also installed woocommerce on this. Those 2380 comments out 2381 comments is from Woocommerce.

[DevinWalker]

Resolved via #3627

[mehul0810]

@kevinwhoffman While testing this issue and discussion with @ravinderk, it seems that we don't have a filter to exclude the comments count of give_payment_note in wp_comment due to which we have created a separate comments table for Give. Now, after migration as we are not deleting the comments data from wp_comments and its metatable. Then, this issue will still exist for customers as the Give comments exist in wp_comments. I would suggest having a health check plugin to delete comments from wp_comments and wp_commentmeta so that support team can help customers delete the Give comments from the old tables after confirming successful migration. Hence, re-opening the issue

Let me know your thoughts.

[kevinwhoffman]

Slack Chat Summary

Participants: @DevinWalker @kevinwhoffman @ravinderk
Topic: Whether to remove old comments in 2.3.0 or later
Result: We agree to take care of removing those old comments in 2.3.0 rather than wait for a future release, which would require another DB upgrade and cause support issues in the meantime.

@ravinderk Please move forward with the fix to remove old comments only if we can be sure that the comments have been successfully migrated to the custom tables.

[ravinderk]

Closing this issue in favor of #3737 (comment)