Technical Issues Open Thread

Two recurring issues regarding commenting:

1) There is some sort of a bug in the commenting software that occasionally causes comments to be rejected as lacking a valid email address, even when you have provided one. We think this is somehow related to the TypeKey registration required on some blogs, but it's hard to reproduce.

The solution to this problem appears to be deleting the cookies on your web browser, and re-posting. If this happens to you, please email me (address in the Contact tab above), and tell me when it happened, what browser and OS you were using, and what other ScienceBlogs sites, if any, you commented to recently. That information will help the developer track this problem down.

(I've also changed the comment module template to include the "delete your cookies" advice, not that this will help anyone...)

2) Some people are getting their comments caught in the spam filters, and I have to retrieve them from the Junk Comments by hand. In particular, semi-regular commenter Thomas Winwood, your IP address shows up in a spam blacklist service, so all of your comments are presumptively junked.

The comment spam isn't yet so overwhelming for fishing them out of the junk to be ridiculously onerous, but I won't necessarily get to it immediately, and sometimes I forget to check for a day or two. If you post a comment, and it doesn't show up, email me, and I'll see if I can find what happened. (Though you may need to wait until I get home from work.)

Those are the tehnical issues that I'm currently aware of. If there are other glitches that I ought to know about, and the system will let you post comments, post a comment here and tell me about them, and I'll see what can be done.

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I'm posting this partly as a test. On another site, I was getting email-address rejections on comments because atyp.us had an MX record but pl.atyp.us (which I actually use) doesn't. That was a home-grown comment system, though, so the problem might be specific to that site.

The problem is therefore with your method of detecting my IP (one method grabs my true IP of 80.6.80.169, the other will grab the IP of the proxy NTL forces me to browse through). I can't help that until I move to Manchester later this year, A-levels willing.

Testing...because I haven't seen a comment show up for a week or two.

But I'm not about to toss my cookies. Cookies are good. Mmmmmmmmm Cookies.

By Ick of the East (not verified) on 29 Mar 2006 #permalink

Thomas Winwod: The problem is therefore with your method of detecting my IP (one method grabs my true IP of 80.6.80.169, the other will grab the IP of the proxy NTL forces me to browse through).

I don't know if I have any ability to change that.
I'll try to fiddle with the junk scoring to see if I can find a way to let you through, but catch the real spam.

Ick: Testing...because I haven't seen a comment show up for a week or two.

But I'm not about to toss my cookies. Cookies are good. Mmmmmmmmm Cookies.

It's not the cookies in your case-- you got nailed by the same spam filter that caught Thomas.

I have this problem intermittently with a lot of the Scienceblogs sites, including Aetiology and Pharyngula, mostly when I am using Firefox on my Windows 2000 notebook. I have not noticed any problem with Firefox on my Linux box, though.

Clearing the site cookie clears it up, but it's still a pain.

Like it just happened, Scoob. Had to clear out the scoobie snacks to make this comment, like, go.

My browser (multiple versions of Firefox under both linux and WinXP) always fails to find the #more tag at the fold. That is, every time I click on "read on" on the front page, I start at the top of the page rather than at the fold, meaning I have to search for where I left off. This problem appears to be common to all the different blogs on this site.