WordPress says I have comments awaiting moderation, but they do not exist!

Have you ever had a similar problem? You have a WordPress blog and then in the top menu of your blog you can see that WordPress says how many comments you have awaiting moderation. It is of course great if you have lots of comments awaiting moderation, but what if you want to check them, but as you look through your pending comments, you simply cant find them.

In other words, WordPress says that you have comments awaiting moderation, but in the reality for you, they do not exist, because you can not find them! I have had this problem on several blogs until recently, but luckily I managed to find the solution that fixed the problem, so that I now can see all comments awaiting moderation, and remove all comments that I consider spam or junk.

So, what did I do to get rid of those invisible comments awaiting moderation?

I asked in a forum and then I got the advice to disable all plugins in WordPress, and if that did not help, then change to the standard Twenty Fourteen template in WordPress. I started to disable all plugins, and once I had done that I check the “comments awaiting moderation” again, and on the list of pending comments I could suddenly see them all listed. They were mostly spam, so I trashed them, and finally I got to see the number of comments awaiting moderation back to 0 again.

After this check I did a more thorough check to find out exactly which plugin managed these problems in my case, and after activating and disabling some plugins I found the guilty plugin to be the plugin I use on some multilingual WordPress sites, a plugin named WPML. Since that is an important plugin to me, I simply disabled it, deleted the comments, and activated the plugin again, and life went on as before, just that I did not have any invisible comments awaiting moderation anymore!

Hope this have helped you, and enjoy blogging!