T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s kind of annoying to get the same notification in six different posts, on twitter, and in email. So as a catch-all: Yes, comment threading is broken. Sort of. Sometimes. In some cases.
I can’t reply to certain threads in the most recent Spoiler Warning post. But others I can. It’s not based on user, or time, or comment depth. It’s not caused by any of the most likely plugins. I haven’t made any changes to the site on ages.
I put this post here to run some tests and to act as a general “OUT OF ORDER” sign on the site. I’m working on it.
Current status: Baffled and annoyed.
EDIT: Boom! Problem solved.
Okay, how WordPress handles threaded comments is a little unexpected. Let’s say we’ve got a comment thread like this:
- I am hungry. – Alan
- Me too, I could really go for a hamburger. – Barbara
- Ugh. No thinks. I’m a vegetarian. – Carl
- That’s so sweet! I love animals! – Denise
- I never said I was sharing my hamburger with anyone. :) – Barbara
- Man, that sounds good! – Alan
- Ugh. No thinks. I’m a vegetarian. – Carl
- There is never a wrong time for pizza. – Earl
- Me too, I could really go for a hamburger. – Barbara
- Man, writing this example thread has made me hungry. – Shamus
If I delete the root comment, or even if Alan makes a change to his original comment that gets it shoved into moderation, then WordPress FREAKS OUT and abandons all attempts at threading:
- Me too, I could really go for a hamburger. – Barbara
- Ugh. No thinks. I’m a vegetarian. – Carl
- That’s so sweet! I love animals! – Denise
- I never said I was sharing my hamburger with anyone. :) – Barbara
- Man, that sounds good! – Alan
- There is never a wrong time for pizza. – Earl
- Man, writing this example thread has made me hungry. – Shamus
All future replies to ANY of these comments will appear at the top level. Basically, none of these comments can ever appear in any thread ever again unless the original comment from Alan is restored.
So… that was odd.
Anyway. Problem solved. Let’s move on.
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First!
First reply!
I can’t conclude anything yet, but currently the only place that comments are malfunctioning is on the most recent Spoiler Warning post. I blame Josh.
And not all threads are malfunctioning. Just some of them. It’s like some comments are just impervious to replies. Ones that already have replies can get more.
Josh is the undisputed master of finding annoying bugs & other undocumented “features”.
How about comments by non-Shamus entities, any problem with those?
So is commenting going to generally help you out or should we abstain?
“Seeing and hearing gnomes is not mental delusion, but extension of faculty”
– Charles Isham
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ” ““ Bill Cosby
I hadn’t heard that one before. Love it!
How do we know when things break? What does it look like?
When it fails, you’ll know. Even if you’re not online at the time, you’ll know. And then… the End Times begin…
I was wondering that myself.
If we can duplicate the issue in a reliable manner, that would help.
As the number of comments on a particular topic increases, the usefulness of additional comments approaches zero.
Weird, the time codes are about 1 hour off now.
Yeah, it looks like Atlantic time now, even though Shamus McFamous is likely in EST.
This also seems to be preventing me from editing my comments, unless Shamus disabled that feature.
Don’t be worried about commenting here, if anything Shamus can use these comments to test/narrow down the issue. (as there is nothing of value in these comments really, that need to be preserved long term at least).
He’s just saying that if comments are acting up on the blog, this is why, and keep in mind that commenting might/might not work for some.
I am rather surprised though that Shamus has not just rolled his own login and admin and user system, blog and his own comment system etc. He certainly has the coding skills needed to do that.
All you need is a little HTML and CSS to present to the users and in the backend a database of sorts (MySQL or SQLite etc.) and some PHP.
And admin login can be secured easily by using HTTPS (note to Shamus, startssl.com free single (sub-)domain SSL certificate i.e you can get a https for shamusyoung.com and http://www.shamusyoung.com in fact, I suggest you do that even now to help secure your admin/login to manage your blog)
Ooh! You do have https (kind of)
“www.shamusyoung.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.hmdnsgroup.com , hmdnsgroup.com” warning in Firefox when I tried https://www.shamusyoung.com
Anyway, back on topic.
Make sure you rule out Javascript and Flash conflict as well. I have no idea how much or little the flash plugin messes stuff up. I wish you could embed HTML5 video instead of flash, but any youtube video ads would not be able to play in that case (they need flash for some reason), text overlay ads does not need flash.
There are other javascript stuff going on, and while I’m sure Google tests their code well, other might not. So twitter widgets which use javascript could conflict with the AJAX comment stuff etc.
Other than asking a WP guru for their insight, all I can provide are speculations as to any causes. (The Josh in itself is an enigma and beyond the scope of relativity so anything goes in that case)
It looks like this is working. I wonder if it has to do with the crilic characters in the comments?
Highly unlikely since he is using unicode. It’s not 90s any more.
For what it’s worth, on a shared web host, it’s (in my experience) unlikely that you will be allowed to use a SSL certificate for your own domain. The URL of the site being requested is passed after the SSL connection is established making it effectively impossible to match the certificate to the request. See http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHosts for a bit more exposition.
The hmdnsgroup.com domain seems to be associated with “Hosting Matters”, which (according to the results of a quick search) is who Shamus contracts for his hosting.
Just use SNI. It’s broken (because it’s unimplemented) on all IE versions pre-vista, but that’s fine; XP users shouldn’t be using any version of IE anyway. Other browsers have supported it for years now, possibly even decades.
This seems like a lively discussion. I have now added my own two cents.
And a reply for good measure.
What’s also broken: I can’t see the avatar pictures, nor does the site remember my name and e-mail.
Editing is also gone, but threading works fine for me.
Yeah, no editing for me either.
For the record, I’ll take a guess and say this is from him disabling stuff temporarily?
The icons are from gravatar, if that site/service is down, so are icons. Including Shamus’ icon.
Hey Shamus! Maybe you should use static local hosted icons for Shamus and Josh etc, so that if there are gravatar issues then at leas your post has an icon?
A week or two ago no icons showed for me, luckily you had a fallback text for the image that said Shamus but…
The Gravatar icons might be down for you if you use the Ghostery addon.
They suddenly stopped working for me a few days ago and it took me a bit to find out some (silent) update from Ghostery now blocks Gravatar by default.
I wonder if its replying to a comment, then the original being edited / deleted / spam filtered?
Such as if this is a reply to my previous comment, but the other comment fails moderation (hint hint Shamus :p )
Just a note, when I first read through the comment thread in question, I noticed a post by you, Shamus, that was replying to another (the one about blum being credited on imdb). When I checked back later, it had turned into a non-reply post.
Unless my memory is wrong, which is possible (sorry, didn’t think to make screenshots), that might mean the bug can take effect well after posting?
No idea if that’s relevant and wish I could check to see if I remember it correctly. Can anyone confirm or deny this observation?
Never mind. You ninja’ed a solution as I was typing this :)
Is it fixed?
I just left a new comment over on the latest spoiler warning thread, and it seemed to work correctly.
Wait, I’m an idiot… I was posting in the Diecast thread. Ignore me!
So that’s why the comment editor was broken earlier today!
P.S. Seems to be working now.
Didn’t we have this exact same problem in the early summer?
dangit shamus! You can’t just post ‘nvm guys I fixed it’! This is a programming blog! You wrote several paragraphs explaining HOW it was messed up and never mentioned WHY it was messed up!
(For the record, I’m kidding. Or possibly spoiled. Not quite sure)
*edit* Hmm, I contradicted myself. Ah well. Spirit’s pretty much the same.
“If I delete the root comment, or even if Alan makes a change to his original comment that gets it shoved into moderation, then WordPress FREAKS OUT and abandons all attempts at threading:”
Wait…You knew that already.It happened before,and you found out about it back then.Will you forget about it again after this?
Shamoose,make this post a sticky one for you so that you dont have to remember how to fix it next time.
Sorry.