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.
A couple weeks back, while trying to discover what exactly the fuck was up with the “Report” button that mysteriously appeared next to “Reply” in comments, I found myself wandering through the bleak, shabby A.I. wilderness, like Ted and the gang in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
I still had a mouth, and I was screaming, albeit virtually. But at whom?
First at bat was a bot, because of course it was. They reign supreme in Lower Supportistan and Customerservicesylvania. This level is tasked with solving the easy problems, which mostly I am not. Ask any publisher.
With the bot dispatched, next up was a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” Could’ve been from MeatWorld®, maybe ESL with an A.I. assist, but felt slightly off, like the HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, etc. Or maybe the reassuring, yet slightly menacing drone of The President from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Occasionally one longs for a Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Still, one never knows. Automattic (with its sidekicks WordPress, Akismet, Jetpack, et al.) has big feet, one in MeatWorld® and the other on the Infobahn. So I dialed back the attitude, got a side of actual help with the platitudes, fired off an email to Akismet support, and went about my business.
Until I got a chipper reply from Akismet’s “Happy Bot” asking whether I was happy too. Ignoring that earned me a followup from — well, I have no idea what. Happy Bot ratted me out to someone, or something, which asked:
Since we haven’t heard back, we’re just checking in to see if the AI-generated response answered all your questions. Our goal is to ensure you get the help you need efficiently. If you require additional support from one of our experts, please reply to this email.
Well. Shit. Lead with your chin, why don’t you? So reply I did, recapitulating the original snark-laden complaint that led me down this digital rabbit hole.
And finally, I got an actual human response.
I think.
Which brings me to this piece in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He writes:
Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?
There’s much more to it, of course. And you should definitely read the Sam Kriss essay Warzel links to.
The Jetpack “Happiness Engineer” who was my last point of contact regarding this gripe professed humanity. My suspicions about the use of British spellings and semicolons were addressed (my correspondent mentioned having lived in the UK, writing detective novels on the side, and happily claimed semicolon usage as “proof of life”).
And my problem with the “Report” button? It too was addressed, and resolved:
Where things stand now: the developers who built this feature evaluated the results and determined it wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the concerns it raised, including exactly the kind of concerns you described. The Report button has been completely removed. It is no longer appearing on any site, including yours, regardless of your Akismet settings. You don’t need to do anything.
Y’hear that? I don’t need to do anything.
So … I’m happy? I guess. I think so. Yeah, sure, I’m happy.
But isn’t that exactly what they want? (Cue the spooky music. …)
A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.
I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.
First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:
The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?
Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”
A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:
We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.
I threw a flag on that play:
I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.
I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.
If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.
The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.
When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:
The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.
Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”
Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.
I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:
Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.
Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.
The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.
I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.
Is it the State? Is it the Corporation? Aren’t they both the same thing these days? With Jesus as CEO, P.T. Barnum as COO, and Michael Corleone as CFO?
Whatevs. Ye Olde Blogge has been acting out this morning for no good reason, so if all you’ve been getting is the Jolly Roger and a hearty “Stand and deliver!” when you drop by, pay it no mind. It’ll either work or it won’t, just like everything else.
Except the blog don’t cost nothin’.
Mad Blog Media 