Moderated comments should generate explanation

I’ve set my comment settings to moderate all first time commenters. With Peter Westwood’s help, I’ve discovered that, at least in my Almost Spring theme, a first time commenter will NOT see a message explaining their comment was moderated. What they will see is their comment displayed on the pg. I think this is awfully confusing. I’ve had people whose comment was moderated tell me that the comment was published and then deleted by me. They see the ‘published’ comment. Then they clear their cache or go away from the pg. & return…only to find the comment ‘deleted.’

The reason this is important is that I want everyone moderated to understand they’re all being treated the same way. I don’t want a commenter to believe I singled their comment out for deletion AFTER it was published.

Peter came up with some code to go into the comments.php file in the theme folder which corrects the behavior:

<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
Your comment is awaiting moderation by the author. <?php endif; ?>

Could anyone tell me if their theme works similarly or differently? If most themes work the same way as my theme’s default behavior I think it’s unnecessarily confusing for a commenter.

Another suggestion I have is, for a moderated comment, to eliminate entirely the display of the comment after the commenter clicks “submit comment.” If they don’t see the comment on the pg & only see a msg. saying the comment was moderated, then they won’t even think it was published.

Peter’s also written a hack for this but I haven’t test it yet.