Comments weren’t working on this blog for some reason.
Problem
When trying to post you’d be redirected to the post’s URL followed by /comment-page/#comment-. But, it should look more like this /comment-page-1/#comment-74. I’d also get an email about a new comment, but all the normal fields would be blank, i.e. Author, Email, URL, WHOIS, and Comment.
Testing:
Googling the problem I found this issue is usually caused by bad permalink structures. So I made sure the htaccess file is writable and only contains the automatically generated wordpress lines. I even temporarily removed my root folder htaccess file for a minute but that didn’t fix the comments (though it did have all the folders display indexes, 1990s style.)
Since I do use a custom link structure (/%year%/%postname%/) I turned it off and still had the same problem. With it off I got this URL:
http://www.robertpate.net/blog/?p=200#comment-
And that URL did not 404! But there was still no new comment. Looking at it I realized that the comment should have an ID on the end, but didn’t. So it wasn’t a permalinks problem, it was a “comments aren’t getting saved to the database” problem.
I updated all the wordpress files and switched to the new theme, just in case. But since that didn’t solve anything I logged into cPanel and was able to run a check and repair on the database. It threw some nasty errors, and then the repair fixed them all in the span of about 60 seconds.
Today I Learned: 1. Databases can trip and hurt themselves. 2. Timeout errors while uploading via FTP may be due to being on a virtual machine.
Glad to see you got the comments working again! I saved the comment I was going to post somewhere. Unfortunately I can’t find where! So I thought I’d comment on this post instead. I just purchased Thesis themes for one of my sites and am in the process of downloading wordpress.org to set it all up. Your issue with comments makes me a little scared that I might be in over my head! I’ve done html work in the past but most of my designs have been in weebly, squarespace, or wordpress.com We’ll see how it goes…
nah, don’t worry. setup and configuration can get technical, but if you’ve setup sites in wordpress.com before you won’t see a lot of new stuff. Weird issues like this are rare, and honestly I could have referred this to my webhost’s tech support team.
Just make sure to run your updates when it says to, turn on akismet, and add unique keys and salts where it says to in wp-config. Good luck!