Create a “Reject” action for comments?

I’d like editors on my site to be able to reject comments, alongside approve/unapprove/spam/trash, both individually and in bulk. The reason is that all of our comments have to be approved before they go live, but we tend to keep rejected comments around (we often flag them with a reason why they’re being rejected). We have multiple users who handle comment moderation, so just “unapproving” a comment makes it hard to tell whether it has been reviewed or is still pending.

I am curious whether it is feasible to create something like this (ideally with a dropdown of reasons why a comment is being rejected that a moderator could choose from) within WordPress, or whether I’d be better off just sending rejected comments to the Trash and disabling the automatic delete.

It’s currently not that easy to create new comment statuses in WordPress.

Comments in WordPress have a field comment_approved which can have a value of 1, 0, spam or trash. In your case I’d probably leverage the existing trash functionality and store the rejection reason as comment meta.

That’s similar to how anti-spam plugins like Antispam Bee store the spam reason as comment meta and display it separately in the admin.