Comments on: Commenting problems on this site

By: How to speed up WordPress at Tom Raftery’s I.T. views

How to speed up WordPress at Tom Raftery’s I.T. views — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:12:31 +0000

[...] Help on Subscribing « Commenting problems on this site [...]

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:32:33 +0000

Arzt - the only plugin I have for commenting is the default Akismet plugin which ships with WordPress. I turned on caching, as suggested by Keith and James in the comments above and I’m hoping that will help.

Rob - the Javascript/Ajax commenting has been switched off.

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 16:20:21 +0000

Possibly that weird Javascript thing you use for comments? People may simply have Javascript disabled; have you checked that it degrades gracefully?

By: Arzt

Arzt — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 15:45:49 +0000

@Tom
Which plugins do you use for controlling the comments, because i also have problems in my blog…

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:02:13 +0000

This will have to be written up as a separate post when I resolve it.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:00:28 +0000

James,

I have implemented the cache’ing as you suggested (thanks Keith for the suggestion as well!).

The name thing is just bizarre. My moderation and blacklists are empty so it can’t be anything there.

Any chance that’s just a coincidence?

By: James (aka MacManX)

James (aka MacManX) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 07:37:15 +0000

Now here’s a weird lead for you.

Every time I tried to post the comment that I eventually emailed to you, I used “James” as my name. I also used “James” the first time I attempted to post the comment above. On the second try, I used “James (aka MacManX)”, and the comment went through.

I don’t recall ever using “James” to comment here before, but I have frequently used “James (aka MacManX)”. So, maybe the name has something to do with it, though I don’t see how that could make a difference under WordPress’ commenting system.

By: James (aka MacManX)

James (aka MacManX) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 07:31:38 +0000

As an alternative to Keith’s suggestion, you might want to activate WordPress’ object cache by adding define('ENABLE_CACHE', true); after the define WPLANG; line in wp-config.php.

Either way, a blog as popular as this one should have some sort of cache running.

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 02:08:52 +0000

I don’t know if you’re doing it right now, but if you’re not, you should think about installing a caching plugin to lighten server load. After all, the more and finer-grained caching you do, the fewer hits you make on the DB. A good caching plugin will also add the proper HTTP headers to allow HTTP caching to work properly. The only downside of this is that you might not see quite so many hits as the load will have been distributed across the various caching proxies dotted around the world, but it will make your site automagically more responsive.

By: adam

adam — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 17:40:43 +0000

Fair enough Tom, I thought you said you had more on this than the CIX blog. It really is very odd though, I just tried posting this comment and it timed out to a blank page. It’s very hit and miss, I’m wondering is there some kind of networking problem somewhere.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:25:16 +0000

I thought it was pretty clear that I was saying you were taking Michele out of context

Ah, I understand now Adam. I didn’t get that from your last comment, sorry.

On the plugin front< i don’t actually have that many plugins enabled on this blog. I maintain several other client blogs which would have more plugins than this one and which have no commenting issues.

By: adam

adam — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:43:46 +0000

Tom, I thought it was pretty clear that I was saying you were taking Michele out of context: He said plugins AND anti-spam measures were probably the problem, and you immediately focussed on anti-spam measures. As I’ve explained to you, the number of plugins you run is most certainly a contributory factor. Not possibly or maybe, certainly.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:17:10 +0000

Bernie - in that case I won’t bother re-enabling the comment preview.

Conor - so true, intermittent problems are a curse to fix!

By: Conor O'Neill

Conor O'Neill — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 12:26:00 +0000

One thing I saw yesterday was that the long post refused to “commit” but the one liner I posted complaining about the problem went in instantly. I don’t know if that helps.

It worked fine this morning. Nothing worse than an intermittent problem!

By: Bernie Goldbach

Bernie Goldbach — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:26:48 +0000

My Border Manager problem is something at my end related to session time-outs. It seems the website sends a different session ID than the comment preview pane and when that happens all commenting subject to previews may fall over.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:44:41 +0000

MacManX,

thanks for persisting (and eventually emailing me) with your comment.

I had problems in the past with Bad Behaviour so I am slow to try this again.

I have cleared the moderation and blacklists, as suggested.

Also, I have updated Akismet to the latest 1.2.1 and optimized my MySQL database using phpadmin as you suggested via email.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:35:04 +0000

MacManX emailed me the following comment which he failed to leave after several attempts:
How many undesired comments is Akismet catching on an average daily basis? If it’s more than 100, you may want to install Bad Behavior to lighten the load on Akismet and WordPress’ commenting system.

http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/

Also, if you are using Akismet, you should keep your comment moderation list and blacklist clear for optimum efficiency.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:18:54 +0000

Adam - I didn’t misquote Michele - I copied and pasted what he said.

Roger - I’m not sure that it is Akismet causing the problem. Akismet is the default anti-spam plugin for WordPress. If it was the problem commenting would be broken on far more sites surely.

Bernie - that surprises me. I had no idea that comment previews could cause firewall issues for people. I turned off the previews on this site about a week ago when troubleshooting this problem.

By: Bernie Goldbach

Bernie Goldbach — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 06:02:44 +0000

When trapped behind a Novell Border Manager at work, I normally cannot leave comments on websites that offer previews before posting the comments.

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:21:39 +0000

I thought it somewhat ironic that you were giving out about the operation of somebody else’s commenting (can’t find the post now) when you’re own seemed a bit flakey to me. I don’t know why it’s being caused but I can only hazzard a guess that it’s the time lag in polling the akismet servers…but that may unfair on the akismet guys and may reflect on my lack of understanding of exactly how it works as I’ve never used it myself. Perhaps it operates something along the lines of a no-wait-ping - just showing the comment to the person making the comment until it gets the answer back from akismet. Yo no sÃ©.