Let’s see… What will today’s computer nightmare be?
Ah, there it is! Comments un-approve themselves as fast as I can approve them. It’s a hellish form of Whack-a-Mole.
I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’! Yesterday viewer numbers sank back into the abyss, too. That’s because WordPress simply doesn’t count a lot of them, so I have no idea what’s going on here.
Well, let’s post a hymn or something…
The colossal mess that this blog turned into during the week has almost been cleaned up. Approved comments still un-approve themselves, again and again, until finally that stops. A regular reader, Thewhiterabbit, is still being called “anonymous” or “somebody.” Honest, Dave, I’m trying to get your name back.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow is a big day for Violet Crepuscular: Chapter 500 of Oy, Rodney! I mean, if the thing is still working tomorrow…
I was going to say we’ve solved the bottomed-out viewership problem, but you know what happens if you ever say a thing like that. General Custer’s last reported words: “We’ve got ’em now, boys!”
My blog is broken, but still struggling along, trying to get out of the quicksand. Comments I approved yesterday were unapproved this morning so I had to approve them all over again. That’ll get old fast.
I’ll be forward readers’ complaints to the WordPress Happiness Engineers in hopes that they will finally solve the bleedin’ problem. I’ve spent hours on this already (this is not how books get written!) and expect another siege today. *Sigh*
Please be patient! Rest assured I want your comments posted! So far no one’s figured out what’s wrong.
All the pieces in this jigsaw puzzle have the same shape! I wonder if WordPress designed it.
If your comments are still getting blocked (*sigh!), I’m still working on the problem. Here is the latest word from WordPress.
It’s “required that the commenter be logged in, or fill in the name and email fields when leaving the comment. If any of these fields is empty, the comment won’t post and they’ll get the filling-out-all-fields error.” Then they turned off a setting, whatever that means.
If you’re still blocked, please email me “with as much detail as possible” so they can keep working on this problem.
Your comments are very important to me! Please stay with me, I’m doing all I can to straighten our this mess.
Readers are miffed because it seems WordPress won’t let them post their comments. I spent practically the whole afternoon yesterday with the WP Happiness Engineers, trying to fix this. We thought we had… but were quickly proved wrong.
If it were all the readers all the time, a problem like that would be easily identified and put to rights. But when is anything easy? No–some readers have no problem at all. Some can’t get their comments up no matter what they do. A few are able to do it sometimes. There’s no pattern here!
You can hardly post comment that says “I can’t post a comment.” You could email me about it, and I could forward your email to the Engineers: that might help.
I’m miffed, too. I want to read your comments! I want us to enjoy fellowship and conversation! I just don’t know how to solve the problem. I mean, if it stumps “Unknowable,” what chance have I got?
Some of you have found it impossible to post comments today–and as usual these days, our viewer numbers are way short of what they would normally be.
So I’ve just spent over an hour with a WordPress Happiness Engineer, trying to solve these problems.
*He thinks the posting problems were temporary and should go away soon, he having made some repairs. Please don’t ask me to explain! If your comments still aren’t being posted, please try again a little later and let me know if it still doesn’t work.
*I have learned that posts read in emails, or on the WP Reader, don’t count as views–not the same as somebody actually visiting the site and clicking an article. That’s supposedly been fixed, too. We shall see.
So much for the hour I meant to spend editing Behold! I am worn out (and worried about Erlene). Well, at least I got Newswithviews done, and wrote another several pages of Ozias. Maybe I should just go soak my head a while.
Requested by Janet last year (!)–A Mansion Just Over the Hilltop, by George Jones.
Folks, I know a lot of you are wondering why some of your comments don’t get posted. WordPress says it’s the algorithms. Well, it isn’t me! Anyway, I’m going back into the “Spam” and “Pending” buckets in search of comments that should have been posted but weren’t. There I approve them for posting. Where and when they get posted… I don’t know.
Janet, I’m sorry it took so ridiculously long to fulfill your hymn request! I hope you can say “Better late than never.”
So yesterday I finally decided to consult the WordPress Happiness Engineers to find out why some of you find your comments disappearing into the Blahsmos as soon as you think you’ve posted them.
First I got a surprise, a message I’d never seen here before: All the happiness engineers are currently busy, please check back with us later. All busy doing what? I’ve been here ten years and never saw that message till yesterday evening.
By and by I got through–and then learned that my readers’ missing comments are probably in a cache called “Pending,” where they have to be either approved or rejected. I looked, and there they were. “You have to train the algorithm so that it knows what you want or don’t want,” the engineer told me. Well, okay, fine. I got rid of a lot of junk and approved a bunch of comments.
If you try to post a comment and it simply disappears, please let me know: there’s a decent chance that I’ll be able to find it and revive it.
Algorithms. Does that mean “mindless robot”? Stupid robot that dumps everything into the spam folder unless directed otherwise? Yeah, I think that’s what it means.
Machines are supposed to be our servants. [Fourteen-minute laugh break.] Well, at least they don’t steal the spoons.
If you’re wondering why I haven’t reblogged any posts from Christian bloggers lately, well, I’m trying! WordPress hasn’t been letting me do it. I go through all the steps, and on the original blog the message appears: the post has been reblogged on my site. Only of course it hasn’t. It’s been shot off somewhere into cyber-limbo.
I won’t even describe what I have to do now to get a post published. And I’d better hurry up with this one!
From time to time, regular readers of this blog mysteriously disappear. Often it’s because of a computer problem. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, you get cut off from a blog that you’ve been following. In desperation, someone might ask me to fix the problem! Might as well ask the cat.
We haven’t seen hide nor hair of Joshua all week. With him living in Japan, I can’t exactly ring his doorbell and see if he’s all right. We’re all connected in cyberspace! A tenuous connection, sometimes, easily disrupted.
Several of you have lost your email notifications, again for no reason, or lost your ability to post a comment–again, no reason–and all I can say is, “And they want to put a computer in charge of our nuclear missiles??” I have no idea why those things happen. If only there were such a thing as a WordPress troubleshooter who spoke English instead of just computer lingo, accessible to all.
Joshua! Where are you, man? Is everything all right? Do you need some prayers? Or is it just your computer going on strike, just to exasperate you?
We do care about each other, this blog is a fellowship–and we all want to stay in touch, don’t we?
So please don’t disappear on purpose!
