Comments Are Working Again

Comments are working again.

It’s all a bit mysterious to me, since I don’t know what went wrong or what fixed it. I’ll update this post if I ever get a clue. But in the meanwhile, it’s good that comments are working.

UPDATE: It turns out that the server was overloaded – they restarted Apache and cleaned the MySQL tables and that did the trick. I’ll try to prevent this happening in the future.

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8 Responses to Comments Are Working Again

  1. 1
    Jane Galt says:

    A propos of nothing, I just got a weird flash of that Twilight Zone episode with the scary kid who disappears people he doesn’t like into the cornfield . . .

  2. 2
    John Howard says:

    Speaking of comments, Amp, what do you think of FamilyScholars blog deleting all of the old comments? I can understand their decision to turn off comments, based, assuming it is based on lack of time and people willing to do moderation, as they say it is. But deleting all the old comments? I feel very upset that it’s all gone, I had a few well articulated posts on there, and I linked to a few threads there from my own blog. Do you feel that way? Would Alas! do something like that, or do you, like me, feel there is a blogger responsibility to keep up the old archives, never selectively delete or substantiallly edit anything even if it makes you look bad now?

    Do you think we could ask them nicely to put the comments back? Is it a wordpress issue?

  3. 3
    Daran says:

    I don’t know what went wrong or what fixed it.

    That’s because you no longer have control of the domain.

  4. 4
    Daran says:

    A’post’troph’e test

  5. 5
    Daran says:

    A’post’troph’e test

  6. 6
    Daran says:

    That’s weird. When write something in it with an apostrophe, then post, it’s fine. When I cut and paste something in it with an apostrophe, when I initially post I see some kind of markup gobbledegook. Later, when I reload the page, It’s fine again.

    What do other people see?

  7. 7
    Ampersand says:

    Speaking of comments, Amp, what do you think of FamilyScholars blog deleting all of the old comments? I can understand their decision to turn off comments, based, assuming it is based on lack of time and people willing to do moderation, as they say it is. But deleting all the old comments? I feel very upset that it’s all gone, I had a few well articulated posts on there, and I linked to a few threads there from my own blog. Do you feel that way? Would Alas! do something like that, or do you, like me, feel there is a blogger responsibility to keep up the old archives, never selectively delete or substantiallly edit anything even if it makes you look bad now?

    Do you think we could ask them nicely to put the comments back? Is it a wordpress issue?

    John, it is technically possible, in WordPress, to turn off future comments while leaving the archive of old comments accessible for reading. However, I don’t know if the tech person at Family Scholars realizes that it’s possible to have done it that way. So you could ask them nicely and see what happens.

    Like you, I favor keeping things up and available whenever possible. But of course, it’s their blog, and they have the right to do what they want with it. We all knew that when we posted comments there.

    (I should also mention that thousands of early “Alas” comments, from years ago before I learned to back up frequently, were accidently lost years ago. Dammit.)

    As far as rescuing your own stuff, you might poke around and see if google has any of it saved. If so, do so quickly, since the google chache isn’t a long-term thing.

  8. 8
    Ampersand says:

    Daran: “Smart quotes” entered into the comment box – which you don’t get when you type directly into the comment box, but which you can get by cutting-and-pasting – mess up WordPress sometimes.

    Also, it would have gone the same if I were still the owner of Amptoons.com. The process is the same regardless; I email support, they email me back. If they’re slow to email me back (as happened in this case), the result is that I don’t know what’s happening for a while.