One of the nice features of WordPress is it’s extensive notification options. It’s nice to get an email notifying me when someone has commented on a particular post.

However, something doesn’t seem quite right with the feature.

In the admin screen, under Settings-Discussions, you’ll see these options.

Notice the highlighted option. The idea here is that for a comment to be considered “Legitimate”, it’s author should have at least 1 previously approved comment. Otherwise, you could potentially have a ton of spam get posted "and visible until I notice it and remove it.

Unfortunately, this option doesn’t appear to work quite right in conjunction with notifications.

If the option is unchecked, things seem to be ok, the comment is posted and readable right from the first, AND I get a notification email.

However, if the option is checked, and the comment author doesn’t already have an approved comment, the comment is posted for moderation but not visible (which is correct), but I never receive a notification email of the comment. This is bad because I’ll never know to approve the comment, so no comments that the author posts will be visible until I explicitly go to my site admin pages and check for comments.

So far, I’ve been unable to find any info about this, but I can repeatable reproduce the behavior.