The System Is... Having Problems

I know you normally look forward to the weekend as a chance for our comments of the week, but I see that a great many of you have been commenting/posting and have been encountering problems. Specifically, the problem that the system appears to eat your comments. The time I would normally spend writing our Comments of the Week has gone into trying to find-and-recover them, which is no fun for anyone.

After looking into it (because, sorry, it looks like the people who are responsible for maintaining Scienceblogs don't really care unless the system itself goes completely down), it appears that something is causing all new comments from everyone except Denier and myself (don't know why we're the special ones) to go to spam.

So on Saturday morning, I was able to recover all the comments, but I didn't have time this week to both do the comment recovery and, you know, read, think about, and write responses to them. But hopefully this will help fix the issue moving forward, and I do appreciate all of you who took the time to email me when I asked on Friday about the problems you were experiencing. Comments are back, but I will have to check manually whether they're going to continue to work automatically, or whether I'm going to have to check them all out manually (which means digging through the spam by hand) instead of having the Scienceblogs system functioning properly.

And Wes, if you're listening, this is happening, and my "job" with Scienceblogs should be to write about science, not to admin your neglected system.

Thank you for understanding, everyone.

Please enjoy the best Louisiana Zydeco song/rendition/live performance I've ever encountered, thanks to Rosie Ledet, as a reward for bearing with us here.

For a little bonus info, Mostly Mute Monday (as you've noticed) is on hiatus while we're reviewing the new Star Trek series, Discovery, which is airing on Sunday nights. So to make up for it, this past week saw the first instance of "5 Fact Fridays," which I'm just beginning, to try and start a fun new way to share a little bit more about the Universe with all of you. See you back here soon!
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Thanks for the update.

By Elle H.C. (not verified) on 23 Sep 2017 #permalink

So for me everything is back to normal.

By Elle H.C. (not verified) on 23 Sep 2017 #permalink

Ethan,

Good luck!

John

Ethan,

"... it appears that something is causing all new comments from everyone except Denier and myself (don’t know why we’re the special ones) to go to spam."

Think of a Yin and Yang exclusion filter.
Now invert the filter.
Kinda fits.

@John

Actually it started out inverted. Originally everyone else could post and all of my comments were being auto-deleted. This happened at the same time Wow got suspended for a week. At that time I contacted Ethan via Patreon to let him know of the problem. Apparently whatever actions were taken to restore my ability to post all those weeks ago prevented my being affected by whatever this most recent glitch was.

Denier,

Could be. A quick and easy fix would be to add code the equivalent of "If strCommenter != "Denier" then Evalu8SPAM(strComment) ..." Hardcoding like that always comes back and bites you. If that's what happened, then it would explain why you were untouchable when whatever FUBARed the SPAM filter was moved to production.

The good news is that you're not like Wow.

Just figured I was banned for supporting the POTUS Trump.

By Ragtag Media (not verified) on 24 Sep 2017 #permalink

Is everything back to normal?

By Wesley Dodson (not verified) on 25 Sep 2017 #permalink

As of the past two hours, no comments that should be auto-approved by previously-approved commenters have been held or sent to spam.

Before that, things were not normal. Akismet appears to be going crazy for the first time in years.

It's like what that one real estate developer once told me about single family rental homes: "They have the greatest return possible for the least overall effort, and don't think they need to be in a condition you'd be willing to live in yourself {wink}."

Liked it, a lot better then i was expecting. The idea of a new Star Trek television series excites me. . Kurtzman's television productions are a mixed bag. On the bright side, he is one of the people that gave us Fringe. But, on the other side, he is one of the people that brought us Scorpion.

By Console Cabin (not verified) on 26 Sep 2017 #permalink