Fun and games with comments

Sue (paintermom) contacted me to let me know that blog comments were broken – typical, just as soon as I particularly invite comments on a post!

It would seem that after I updated WordPress when I went to bed last night, one of the plugins stopped working properly and WordPress 3.0.1 decided to deliver a spurious error message and tell commenters that they are spam bots. Just to be even-handed, it even informed me, logged in as Admin, that I was a spam bot too.

Tsk!

I identified the likely problem then spent half an hour with all plug-ins turned off, and adding them back in one-by-one. It was, of course, the one plugin that I expected to be the rogue, and which I added back in last, that proved to be so.

You should find that everything works OK now but if it doesn’t — please use the contact form to drop me a line and let me know.

The other, earlier, problem persists and is resisting diagnosis. I plan to investigate at the weekend. Perhaps you can help me, dear reader?

Here’s the case:

  1. I normally use permalinks, so that the URLs you see are understandable, if long.
  2. I also normally offer the ability to read blog posts by category
  3. Currently, if I have Permalinks ON, then selection of posts by Category does not work
  4. If I turn Permalinks OFF, Category listings start working again
  5. For “Category” read “Category AND Tag”

Here is the question:

If you happen to read the blog on the site, and not by RSS, which do you find most irritating — (A) the change from permalinks to URLs that look like this one: http://www.woolgathering.org.uk/?p=6504 OR (B) the lack of the drop down box to select posts by Category?

Until I can get both to play nicely together, I am happy to go with whatever the reader wants… assuming that I have a reader, of course.

Oh, the Comments link is up there at the left of the post now, if you are reading on the front page.

2 Comments

  1. September 18, 2010

    So nobody replied yet?
    I get thunderbird to collect your rss feed and then I just click through to the web page the read it all.
    Of course, as I commented earlier, if the rss feed url changes, as it did, I don’t see anything until I actually notice the “not found” message when TB collects stuff.
    I do hope you don’t mind me lurking in your blog.

  2. September 18, 2010

    I do hope you don’t mind me lurking in your blog.  

    I could not hope for a nicer lurker 😉

Comments are closed.