Ouf! And you commenters thought hitting the “Continue Reading” button was bad.
Look what happens when I hit the “Continue Writing” button!
(Badaboom, badabing, etc.)
But seriously, folks — the digital detectives at WordPress are trying to solve The Case of the Duplicate Comments, so if any of you happen to see that “Continue Reading” button again as your comment appears once, twice, thrice, etc., please grab a screenshot and send same to Your Humble Narrator.
More as I hear it. …
A quick housekeeping note:
Some of you are seeing your comments on posts multiplying like parasites in a Taco Hell salad. I’m looking into it and will be tugging on the coat of some “Happiness Engineer” here directly.
I asked Herself to post a comment and she did so without issue, using an M1 Mac Mini rocking Big Sur (yeah, I know, OTBJ) and some equally aged edition of Safari. We didn’t get any duplicates, triplicates, or quadruplicates of the comment, nor was she presented with a “continue reading” button after posting, which Longtime Reader of the Blog Steve O’ suggests may be the trigger for comment duplication.
She was not posting as a subscriber to the blog, just using her email and a screenname.
That’s all the intel I have for the moment.
In the meantime, while we await Wisdom, maybe commenters should ignore any “continue reading” buttons after posting and hit their browser’s “back” button instead.
And please be patient while waiting for a comment to appear. I’ve noticed some sluggishness from WordPress lately and attributed it to our ridiculous Internet connection, for which we pay far too much in a town with a national lab, a university, and all manner of other outfits that require something with more git-up-and-go than dialup AOL.
Could be that all these bells and whistles WP has been adding lately has caused something to go awry.
• Addendum: Still waiting on MeatBased® support here. A.I. speculates that “theme-level behavior” may be our problem. This would not surprise me, as this is an old theme, to which I switched after the even older theme started showing some behaviors that would get it punched in some of the bars I used to frequent.
I may have to go to manual approval of comments for a while, so if anything you have to say seems to be a tad slow on the rebop, why, you can blame Your Humble Narrator.
Nothing to see here, folks; move along, move along. I’m just fiddling with the controls to get a handle on how many changes to the posting process WordPress slipped past me whilst I was otherwise occupied.
More as I learn it.
Meanwhile, for any of you who have had comments drift off into the ether, fear not. I’ll begin checking the spam folder a couple-three times a day.
Some of yis have noticed that commenting via Safari seems to have been restored, all praise to Cthulhu, may Its tentacles grow ever longer.
Last night I heard from a code wrangler at Automattic who advised thusly:
This issue has been forwarded to our development team. I cannot give a time frame on when the issue will be fixed but a workaround is to disable “blocks in comments.”
Huzzah, etc. Remember the last time we had trouble with comments? How it forced me into finally abandoning the Classic Editor for the Block Editor, and changing themes to boot?
Yet now, here we are again. Because not only are comments buggered without the workaround, pending a solution from the development team, it could be that the advanced age of my current “new” theme, Penscratch 2, may be part of the problem.
Thus, a tip of the Mad Dog Safari Hat goes out to our own Steve O’, who suggested as much in — wait for it — comments.
Meanwhile, cheers to Jason the Code Wrangler for kicking this thing up the chain of command and recommending the workaround, which works.
While we await the Wisdom from On High I may slap a new coat of theme on an old blog and ask you Safari users to try commenting there. Steve O’ and Pat O’B have been able to comment on this junkpile, which runs on Independent Publisher 2, but I think that theme is a tad long in the tooth as well.
While we await the wisdom of the WordPress Wizards, SAO — one of our longtime readers who can still post comments — suggests that the Dog Blog’s theme, Penscratch 2, may be at least part of the problem.
Penscratch 2 is an old theme — not as old as its predecessor, Kubrick — but still, plenty of white hair in its ears and a stoop to its bony shoulders, plus it seems to have forgotten where it left its keys to the comments. Also, it may have shit the bed.
So, while we wait — and wait, and wait, annnnnnnnnnnnd wait —I need someone who is still unable to comment using Safari, DuckDuckGo, or whatever to try adding a comment to the most recent post, “Age limits,” at this unused blog, which runs the Independent Publisher 2 theme.
Thanks in advance. More as we learn it.
Mad Blog Media 