Blog Comments Fail Fixed

Sometimes trying to improve something is doomed to fail. I wanted to give Sciencetext readers a better experience when reading posts and leaving comments, so I installed various plugins one after the other that are supposed to boost discussion and increase the options available for commenters.

I tried Disqus, which took an age to stall on importing comments, so I have up.

I tried IntenseDebate, which was fast to import, but then timed out on page load.

I tried ChatCatcher, which works on Sciencebase.com but spewed up errors and failed on Sciencetext.

I tried Gravatars, which worked briefly and show up in the comment dashboard but default to the default icon throughout the site proper. FAIL.

Obviously, I uninstalled each system after trying one at a time. And ran Clean Options and then did a database repair and optimize via phpMyAdmin, just to make sure everything was back to normal. Of course, it wasn’t. Comments were not working at all. Readers trying to comment simply got a 404 error for the file wp-comments-post.php instead of seeing their comment displayed below the others on the post…

This is where things start to get frustrating. I doubled checked the comments files and configuration files in Wordpress for spurious blank lines at the start and end of each file. Somehow these can get added in error and blank lines at the top or bottom of a php script will break it. None of those were to blame.

So, was it the Theme, did my tinkering with all those plugins and addons some disrupt the site? Seems not I tested the site with the default theme and comments still failed.

Final step was to check the site’s .htaccess file (a root level configuration file) and lo and behold…up top a single spurious line totally unrelated to any of those plugins but linked to an anti-spam system now in place on Sciencetext. This spurious line was redirecting the wp-comments-post.php to nowhere, wrongly, of course.

Once I had removed the redirect line commenting was immediately back to normal…so please do take the opportunity to leave your thoughts below. Also, if you want to know more about the spam filter we’re using (which blocks all spam bots, 100% with no false positives ever) then send me your email address.