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Lionelb



Joined: 31 Mar 2006
Posts: 14

PostPosted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:36 pm    Post subject: Comment disabled ? Reply with quote

All comments are disable or you have a problem ? It's now not possible to post a comment ...

regards,
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des



Joined: 31 Dec 2004
Posts: 152

PostPosted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 9:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Same here and on another BlogHarbor blog I checked.
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Des Walsh
Gold Coast, Australia
www.thinkinghomebusiness.com
Author, 7 Step Business Blog
http://www.7stepbusinessblog.com
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kow626



Joined: 16 Feb 2006
Posts: 16

PostPosted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 10:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

same prob here. what gives?
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 12:09 pm    Post subject: Commenting Issues/Information and Fixes Reply with quote

Sorry for the delay in responding but we've been working to figure out exactly what the issue is here... Now I have an answer (more than one) for you, so I'll post what I know so far...

Yesterday we made some changes to the commenting system so that the comment form (and captcha) do not load immediately when the page loads, the comment box will appear when your visitor clicks on the Post Comment link.

There are 2 benefits to this approach:
  1. It makes things a little more difficult for comment spammers who use automated systems. This is important, as the number of spammers seeking to exploit blog commenting systems is increasing exponentially.
  2. Creating and managing the comment verification code is very "computationally expensive", which means it takes a lot of back and forth with the CPU and database systems to manage the comment verification images. By showing the commennt verification only when a user requests the Post a Comment link, we have been able to speed up the performance significantly. Our monitors are showing that average page load times are as much as 3x faster than they were before we made this change.
So now instead of seeing a comment entry form when the article appears, that form will only appear when your visitor clicks the Post a Comment link.

So that's what we did and why we did it. Turns out there are some implications and one outstanding bug.

First, the bug. The symptom of the bug that we are seeing is that the Post a Comment link is not working for a user who is logged in to a blog that has Comment Verification enabled for logged in users. If you or your readers are having a problem commenting, login to your control panel and go to Settings & Security > Spam Protection Settings and look for the Comment Verification settings. If Enable Comment Verification for Anonymous and Logged-in Readers is unchecked, please check it. For all blogs which have not customized their templates, this should allow your users to Post a Comment without a problem. We'll be sure to post a note in the control panel dashboard when this problem is fixed, so that you know when you can disable Comment Verification for logged in users.

The other issue is that in order to implement this functionality, we had to make changes to the article and base templates. So if you have a blog with custom article or base templates, your comments are probably not functioning today. We'd hoped that we would be able to automatically roll the changes into any custom templates, but it looks like that did not work as planned...

I posted instructions last night on how to update your article template to include the new changes, and I am working on instructions on how to roll the new changes into your custom base template. We're waiting on confirmation from our developers as to some possible last-minute modifications to the base template, so I am waiting to post those instructions until we're sure which way we're going to go with this.

If you have customized your templates and want us to roll the new changes into your existing article or body templates, please contact us and let us know and we'll make the changes for you as soon as we can...

Very sorry for the inconvenience. We will be working hard to fix these issues and if anyone has any additional feedback or has noticed any other problems, we would welcome any information you could provide.
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gristgal



Joined: 05 Jan 2006
Posts: 209
Location: Mississippi

PostPosted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 5:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, the base color of the links in the above post probably needs to be changed. It's showing up on my screen as a green so faint it's almost invisible. I had to highlight the links to read what they said.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 9:13 pm    Post subject: Re: Commenting Issues/Information and Fixes Reply with quote

First, the bug. The symptom of the bug that we are seeing is that the Post a Comment link is not working for a user who is logged in to a blog that has Comment Verification enabled for logged in users.

This bug was fixed this afternoon, and we squashed one other functionality impacting bug shortly thereafter. So we think the new commenting system is working as it is supposed to.

I posted instructions last night on how to update your article template to include the new changes, and I am working on instructions on how to roll the new changes into your custom base template.

If you have altered either your base template or any of the permanent link family of templates:
  • article
  • photo
  • movie_review
  • music_review
  • book_review
then you will need to make changes to those templates as explained in the article System Templates Updated. It's now been updated with the changes necessary for the base template.

Again, if you have customized your templates and would rather have us roll the new changes into your existing article or body templates, please contact us and let us know and we'll be glad to make the changes for you. If you have never made any changes to your templates, then you don't need to do anything; your blog has already been updated with the revised system templates.
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, this works well when looking at a specific article, i.e. the permalink. Than it's reasonable to save the captcha load, and only do it once you click "Post Comment", as you describe.

However, if you are reading posts on the main page, and from there click not the parmalink, but the "leave comment", then you are first taken to the permalink page, then have to click Post Comment again to be able to get to the comment entry screen. This is redundant, if you hit "leave message", you should not have to have that interim stop. That is the point when readers leave, thinking there is an error in the commenting system.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Very good points, and not ones we would disagree with at all. Unfortunately, from a technical perspective it is a little more complex than it would appear to be on the surface, as always seems to be the case.

Thanks for the feedback, we'll be working on making improvements.
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abacquer



Joined: 22 Mar 2004
Posts: 193

PostPosted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 9:37 am    Post subject: This Explains Why I Suddenly Stopped Getting Comments Reply with quote

Sad

Well I followed the instuctions in your article to modify my custom base template, and trying to post comments on my blog just results in a big old javascript error. Either I messed up the changes (cut and paste so I hope it would work, and I reviewed it twice) or there are other customizations on my blog that break the new commenting scheme.

I don't want my comment form hidden when the user loads the page. I am going to attempt to modify my article template to remove that functionality. Hopefully that will get my commenting system back online.
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-- Abacquer, A.K.A. Chuck Seggelin
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 12:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's another obesrvation: I had several readers who thought the "Enable" button referred to leaving comments, vs. the comment notification only. Yes, I know, the button label is here, but it's still confusing, since the comment form is not immediately there, and the first thing that hits you in the eye is the big enable button. The posts comment link is just underlined text, much smaller. I think they should be brought to equal visisibility, i.e.:
- two buttons, "post comment" and "enable notification"
- or two underlined texts (URL)
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:38 am    Post subject: Re: This Explains Why I Suddenly Stopped Getting Comments Reply with quote

Quote:
Well I followed the instuctions in your article to modify my custom base template, and trying to post comments on my blog just results in a big old javascript error. Either I messed up the changes (cut and paste so I hope it would work, and I reviewed it twice) or there are other customizations on my blog that break the new commenting scheme.


I worked with Chuck yesterday to fix his base template, it looks like there are some older versions of the base template out there and I will need to revise the instructions with that in mind. My apologies to Chuck and anyone else who is unable to make these changes, just send us a line and we will be more than happy to make these changes for you.

Quote:
I don't want my comment form hidden when the user loads the page.


There are a few "workarounds" I am working on and testing. I've shared a few of them with some of you privately and we're testing out which approach works best. I hope to be able to share some of these ideas with you all when we have determined which approach is most compatible.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 9:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

zoli wrote:
Here's another obesrvation: I had several readers who thought the "Enable" button referred to leaving comments, vs. the comment notification only. Yes, I know, the button label is here, but it's still confusing, since the comment form is not immediately there, and the first thing that hits you in the eye is the big enable button. The posts comment link is just underlined text, much smaller. I think they should be brought to equal visisibility, i.e.:
- two buttons, "post comment" and "enable notification"
- or two underlined texts (URL)


One way you could do this is to alter the code in your article template that we used to show the Post a Comment link:

Code:
{{if allow_comments}}
{{if can_post}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment" onclick="return reveal_post_comment_inline(true, false);"><%= gettext("Post a comment") %></a></div>
{{else}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;color:red;"><%= gettext("This blog does not allow anonymous comments.  Please login to leave a comment.") %></a></div>
{{/if}} <!-- can_post -->
{{/if}} <!-- allow_comments -->


and change it to something like this which mimics the look of the Enable Comment Notifications area for authenticated users which appears right above the Post a Comment link:

Code:
{{if allow_comments}}
{{if can_post}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;margin-top:10px;">
Post a comment for this article: <INPUT type="button" name="post_comment_button" class="button" value="Post a Comment" onclick="return reveal_post_comment_inline(true, false);">
</div>
{{else}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;color:red;"><%= gettext("This blog does not allow anonymous comments.  Please login to leave a comment.") %></a></div>
{{/if}} <!-- can_post -->
{{/if}} <!-- allow_comments -->


You might like how that looks better.
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 11:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks, John, this is much better Very Happy
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