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WPML is a professional plugin, so I expect it to allow us E-Commerce Managers to handle WooCommerce in a professional way. If I receive a comment where the customer writes in poor grammar, or includes double spaces, triple commas, etc., we are forced to moderate it before publishing.
Languages: English (English )German (Deutsch )French (Français )
Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+02:00)
I created an internal feature request for this.
I described it as:
In the current implementation of WPML, product reviews submitted on a WooCommerce site are imported into the String Translation tool, even before they are approved through WordPress moderation. This behavior presents a challenge: if a site moderator edits the review for grammar, formatting, or appropriateness before publishing it, the original version of the review (not the edited version) remains in String Translation. This causes outdated or incorrect content to be displayed to users across different language versions of the site.
The only known solution currently involves manually deleting the outdated string from the wcml-reviews domain and re-scanning for strings via the WPML Troubleshooting section. This is not scalable for sites managing hundreds or thousands of reviews, especially when updates are frequent.
Can you tell me this describes what you would like to see in our plugin? Is there anything you think I should add to this?
I’d say that’s spot on—you’ve described exactly what’s happening.
To highlight the urgency of the matter, consumers might even write inappropriate content in their reviews—swear words, for instance. If E-Commerce Managers aren’t given the opportunity to act appropriately, we risk making some serious mistakes.
Languages: English (English )German (Deutsch )French (Français )
Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+02:00)
The presence of inappropriate content like swear words in reviews is fundamentally an issue on the WooCommerce/WordPress side, not WPML specifically. WPML doesn’t moderate or validate review content; it just picks up the strings once they’re stored in the database. So even if WPML weren’t installed, an unmoderated review could still go live in the default language if the site settings allow it.
In any case I will keep this ticket updated I get some feedback from our developers.
That’s clear, Bruno - thank you for clarifying it nonetheless. We don’t expect WPML to block comments of that kind. But we do expect that if something like that ends up in the database, WPML gives us a way to intervene before it’s too late (meaning before a review gets automatically translated and published).
