A message from your blogger
A regular participant tells me he’s had a couple of comments vanish instead of posting, and he was worried I had banned him.
In 18 years I have only had to exercise the banhammer three or four times. I have never done so without several warnings, and I would never stealth-ban anybody.
Every so often the blog gets glitchy about accepting comments. My only suggestion for the moment is that if you have anything longer than a sentence or two to contribute, please compose it in a text editor and save it before pasting it into the comment box, so that you don’t lose your efforts.
I appreciate all participation on this blog and I’m sorry I don’t know why it occasionally gets glitchy like this, but as soon as I can I will have a look under the hood and see what’s going on.
Blork 22:26 on 2020-03-05 Permalink
Call me an old goat, but I’ve been commenting on blogs since comments became a thing (what’s that, like 2002?) and commenting on various pre-blog fora for half a dozen or so years before that. So I take it as second nature to always copy my comment to the computer’s clipboard before hitting “Reply.” By “always” I mean “almost always.” Sometimes I’m in a hurry and I don’t.
I’ve only been bitten by the lost-comment glitch on this blog maybe five times, and every time it follows this pattern:
-> Wake the computer from “sleep” and go to the blog in a tab that hasn’t been refreshed for a while. In the meantime, a bunch of other comments and posts have been made but they’re not showing, even though this blog has some kind of “push” thing that automatically refreshes it.
-> Type the comment and hit “Reply” before the “auto refresh” thing has had a push its refresh.
-> Result: existential three-way fist fight between (a) the un-refreshed blog, (b) my new comment, and (c) the refresh that’s trying to happen. Boom! Lost comment.
Occasionally I’ve been able to recover it by hitting “Back.” Sometimes the stall is so long that I can see it coming and I can grab a screenshot before the page goes boom so at least I can re-type verbatim.
But generally, for longer comments (like this one) I write it in a text editor and then copy/paste it over. For mobile, I have an iOS app called “Edit” that is nothing more than a one-page text scratchpad that works beautifully for this.
BTW, I do this for all commenting (including FB), not just this blog.
Kate 22:28 on 2020-03-05 Permalink
Blork, thanks for the analytical description. I may have to do something about how this WordPress installation handles caching, among other things.
dwgs 22:41 on 2020-03-05 Permalink
When one of my comments gets hung up here I usually have time to copy the text then I hit refresh and paste it anew. When that happens it’s always the scenario Blork describes
Faiz Imam 23:06 on 2020-03-05 Permalink
I’ve lost quite afew comments over the years, but at this point I should know better.
My trick is once i’m done typing my comment, I select and copy it, so that at least its on the clipboard. Easy, quick.
denpanosekai 23:41 on 2020-03-05 Permalink
ctrl+a, ctrl+c, “reply”
Ian 13:26 on 2020-03-06 Permalink
Thanks for the heads-up, Kate. I use DB-Optimize on my WP installs when they start getting glitchy, might be worth a shot – after a complete backup of course haha
MarcG 16:52 on 2020-03-06 Permalink
Sounds like a bug in the WP theme.
Kate 10:38 on 2020-03-07 Permalink
It probably is. The theme is old and this blog is hanging at WP 4.99. At one point all the comments disappeared, and there have been other problems. Ideally I would start over with a fresh install and a newer theme, but I’m always too busy to give this task the solid two-three days it needs, and do it without risking the accrued content.