Comments are disappearing again. Sadly, it seems to happen randomly but more often than it should. I love comments and I don't want to lose any of them--you guys often have more interesting things to say than I do. So please bear with me while we get this figured out.
Also, if you want to try out commenting, this is a good post to try it on, you don't even have to say anything interesting (well, you never do, because not having anything interesting to say never keeps me from writing blog posts, so the precedent is set).
Here are the things that I know help:
- if you have a google account, log into it before you try to comment (Google owns Blogger/Blogspot, so the accounts are the same). Since my blog is so small, I have it set up so you don't have to have a Google account, though. You should be able to leave an anonymous comment. It's just more likely to get lost (apparently).
- change the security settings on your browser to allow "third-party cookies." According to this post, the commenting system uses CAPTCHA to make sure you are a real person, which uses cookies. If your browser blocks third party cookies, the CAPTCHA system won't work, but you don't get an error message, your comment just disappears. So when you click on "publish," nothing happens.*
- If you remember, before you click "Publish," press "ctrl-a" and then "ctrl-c." That will highlight your entire comment and make a copy of it. Then if your comment gets lost, you can try it again and not have to type it all over again. Just press ctrl-v to paste the copied text into a new comment box. It's a pain, and I only occasionally remember to do it myself, but at least it's something.
There is a setting in the comments section on my side of it that I tried changing this week so that when you want to leave a comment, it will pop up a new window. Supposedly this is a more reliable way of leaving comments, but I'm not all that happy with it because it disables my ability to reply to comments (and also your ability to reply to other people's comments). So after about 24 hours I changed it back. If disappearing comments continue to be a problem, we can revisit this.
* To change this setting in Chrome: click on the Chrome menu icon (three horizontal lines in the upper right corner), click on "Settings," scroll down to the bottom and click on "Show Advanced Settings," click on "Content Settings," and uncheck the box that says "Block third party cookies."
4 comments:
OMG. My head just started spinning then it sunk into my spine. I feel like a turtle that doesn't want to peek it's head out until the tech geek goes away. But thanks for caring enough to explain. Was that properly grateful? ;} Oh, AND THIS IS A TEST OF THE COMMENT SYSTEM.
And if I could suck that comment back I would grammatically improve it by changing it's to its. Just sayin'.
Way back what I tried was changing the type of comments to a "pop up" window. Where if they click on Comments it pops up in a separate window. For some weird reason this seems to solve the problems, in most people's cases.
I actually wrote a blog post about it, that's one of my most accessed posts. If it helps. (But pop up commenting seems to be the simplest fix. Or was in 2011.)
http://www.mabeltalk.com/2011/05/bloggerblogspot-how-to-fix-when-people.html
OK, I'm trying the pop-up window. But then I lose the ability to reply to comments, and you can't reply to each other's comments. Also, you lose the "notify me of replies" option. But as an interim measure, I'm willing to try it out.
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