Maybe Now You Can Comment
Thursday, April 7th, 2022
I hope this new spam-blocker lets you post comments again.
I’ve been doing this blog for more than 10 years and over that time I have received very few comments, and I’ve never understood why. Some people who I actually know in person will occasionally send me emails with comments but I’ve always wondered why they don’t just post responses on the blog. That’s what happens on most blogs I’ve seen.
Now, early on I got a lot of comments, but they were about 99.5% spam. So I set up a spam-blocking plug-in on the site and that took care of things. But then I hardly got any comments at all.
Well, at some point I figured out the biggest reason was that anytime anyone tried to post a reply the system failed to carry through. The blog is run on WordPress so I went to an online meeting of a WordPress Meet-Up and asked if anyone there had any ideas. They all looked at the site right then as we were meeting and the only suggestion anyone could offer was to check to see if the plug-ins were causing a conflict. They said I should deactivate all of them and then reactivate them one by one and test each time to see if the system was working. If you activate a plug-in and suddenly things stop working then that’s your problem, probably.
I never got serious about this, but deactivated a couple that I figured were not essential, but no change. But just now I decided to try again. I was running one spam-blocker and it was showing that it needed to be updated. I clicked to update but that took me to a page where it said this domain name was available. What?
So I googled the name and found comments about the company shutting down and the plug-in causing systems to fail. Holy crap! So I deactivated that plug-in and tried to post a comment. It went through. And significantly, in the bare minute or so that that took me, I also received a spam comment. Just that quickly!
OK, I definitely need a spam-blocker so I reactivated another one I had installed but had been deactivated, Akismet. I don’t remember why I deactivated this one, quite some time ago, but maybe it was because they quit offering a free install and I was being cheap. Now they have a “pay what you want” option for non-commercial blogs so I chose that and agreed to pay a dollar a month. And boom, now I have a spam-blocker and it looks like you can finally offer comments again.
Anyone who wants to give it a try, please do. I’m going to be really pleased if this turns out to have solved this issue. Thanks.
Update April 11: Yeah, it looks like it’s working now. So is the spam-blocker. I’m now seeing hundreds of spam comments showing up in the spam folder every few days. If I had to dig through those looking for that stray actual comment it just wouldn’t be worth it.
Biker Quote for Today
My girlfriend, Ruth, fell off the back of my motorcycle. I rode on, ruthlessly.
