Wordpress suddenly will not accept comments - unless it is Tuesday at 10 am ...
September 16, 2011 10:08 AM Subscribe
Wordpress experts: Please help me figure out this baffling thing that's happening with comments on a friend's site.
This is so strange: As of August 24th, my friend's Wordpress site has decided to accept reader comments only intermittently. We've racked our brains and can't think of anything either one of us did on the site on that day (I help him administer it, but neither one of us added/changed/removed plugins on that date, updated anything, nothing). But comments abruptly stopped appearing on the site after that date.
If you go to make a comment on the site (which is culturemaven dot com, BTW) 99 times out of 100 (approximately) it will just refresh the article page and act like nothing happened. The comment doesn't go to the moderation queue ... it just goes away.
But there have been a couple of comments that made it through since then - but it appears to be totally random/arbitrary. Actually, no, check that - the two comments that have made it through were almost exactly one week apart - both on a Tuesday morning, within a few minutes of 10 AM.
I have disabled all plugins and updated everything to the latest version. No help.
Under Discussion settings: "Comment author must fill out name and e-mail " is checked, but we do not require people to register or have a comment moderated before it appears.
Any ideas where to look?
This is so strange: As of August 24th, my friend's Wordpress site has decided to accept reader comments only intermittently. We've racked our brains and can't think of anything either one of us did on the site on that day (I help him administer it, but neither one of us added/changed/removed plugins on that date, updated anything, nothing). But comments abruptly stopped appearing on the site after that date.
If you go to make a comment on the site (which is culturemaven dot com, BTW) 99 times out of 100 (approximately) it will just refresh the article page and act like nothing happened. The comment doesn't go to the moderation queue ... it just goes away.
But there have been a couple of comments that made it through since then - but it appears to be totally random/arbitrary. Actually, no, check that - the two comments that have made it through were almost exactly one week apart - both on a Tuesday morning, within a few minutes of 10 AM.
I have disabled all plugins and updated everything to the latest version. No help.
Under Discussion settings: "Comment author must fill out name and e-mail " is checked, but we do not require people to register or have a comment moderated before it appears.
Any ideas where to look?
Response by poster: Yes, comment banned words list and comment watched/moderate words lists, both completely blank ...
posted by jbickers at 10:28 AM on September 16, 2011
posted by jbickers at 10:28 AM on September 16, 2011
Have a look at the webspace's error logs maybe.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2011
posted by humboldt32 at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2011
Response by poster: My web host was able to point me in the right direction: Akismet is marking 100% of all comments as spam. But there don't appear to be any "tolerance" settings in Akismet ... so I guess that's a plugin flaw and I just need to find another anti-spam solution?
posted by jbickers at 12:12 PM on September 16, 2011
posted by jbickers at 12:12 PM on September 16, 2011
Is it possible you accidentally marked some comments as spam and taught Akismet to see them that way? If so, you can mark them as non-spam to get Akismet to unlearn the mistake.
posted by evariste at 9:03 PM on September 16, 2011
posted by evariste at 9:03 PM on September 16, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
Can you check that it's completely blank? (As in, totally null -- not even any whitespace)?
posted by randomination at 10:24 AM on September 16, 2011