Anti-Spam Plugin Puts Smileys Under Moderation

I was reading that there is a possibility this may have to do with Ajax, and I see that the last update had something to do with Ajax. I’m not a tech person, and I have no idea what that means, but just thought to mention that.

all comments where the commenter uses smileys go under moderation

Anti-spam plugin did not guilty for it because there is no moderation or changing comments status functionality in the plugin. I think the cause of your problem is somewhere else. What other plugins related to comments do you have?

Thanks for the quick response! I have no other plugins related to comments. In fact I only use 6 plugins. The reason I have suspected the Anti-Spam plugin is because nothing else on my site was changed, however as soon as I updated the plugin the problem began.

Is there a possibility to downgrade to the earlier version of the plugin? I know it is not a permanent solution, but at least it would get the problem fixed temporarily until a permanent solution is found.

I just looked at the comments that accumulated overnight. Again; all the ones with no smileys went thru, and all the ones with smileys got stuck under moderation. Even from the same person who’s other comments went thru.

You can download any version of the Anti-spam plugin.

Okay, cool! My tech-guy said he will test the latest version on his website as he also uses the plugin and see if he runs into the same problem. If he can’t figure out what’s the problem I will ask him to downgrade for me. Thanks!

UPDATE: I have thought to update this as the findings of my tech-person were interesting. The issue was NOT with the plugin. In WP 3.8.1 if you add the word “ass” to the moderated words list under the Discussion settings in the WP dashboard, this will put all comments with smileys under moderation. It is possible that this was true with earlier versions of WP as well, but I added to word to my list of moderated word recently so I don’t know. A strange WP bug indeed…