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Posts tagged ‘WordPress’

May 17

38 Comments

I Wish I Knew How To Quit You

Tired of being automatically subscribed to comments on this blog and others? Thanks to Nancy Hatch at Spirit Lights the Way, I now know how to quit getting endless comment notification e-mails from the umpteen million blogs upon which I comment every day.

If you hadn’t noticed, WordPress.com made a change that makes subscriptions to comments AUTOMATIC…..meaning on chatty blogs like this one, many of my regular commenters ARE PROBABLY BEING DRIVEN INSANE BY E-MAIL COMMENT REPLY NOTIFICATIONS. Please understand that we bloggers did NOT implement this asinine policy, which is surely designed to bury readers in e-mail and send them screaming for a spot in the loony bin and chanting the refrain, “I wish I knew how to quit you!!“

Nancy’s informative post references the backstory on this change and provides instructions on how to opt out of comment reply notifications on a global level. Check out her post  Disabling The Default Comment Setting for all the details. Follow this link to opt out of all default comment notifications by unchecking the box in the E-Mail Delivery Settings section. This strategy will also work for those of you who use your Gravatar or WordPress.com identities to comment, even though you may not actually blog.

If you’re like me, you are a busy person who already gets buried by e-mail. You likely do not have time to get an e-mail every single solitary time someone posts a comment or a reply on a blog. You want to decide on a case-by-case basis when you will remain on top of the conversation by subscribing to comments on individual posts. Changing the global default comment setting will return control of your inbox to you.

If you have questions, post them here in a comment today. We can work together to try to get everyone’s settings where they want them.

Mar 28

18 Comments

WordPress Comment Craziness Part Deux

Finally!! An email from WordPress Support regarding the Recent Comment Unpleasantness at WordPress. Below, I have reproduced my question to support and their response. Please, use what you can, and take time in the comments to shoot holes in what you can’t, so that we can collectively refine our grievances in my next query.

Personally, I still have problems commenting from my phone. That’s a real issue for me, and I know for others, and they need to resolve it.

My Question:

> My commenters cannot log in since the recent comment changes. I changed my
> Settings – Discussion as recommended in the forums by unchecking the box
> requiring an email address to make a comment.
>
> Still, many of my non-WordPress commenters are having difficulty making
> comments. They are being sent into a frustrating loop that continually asks for
> their log in information. When they provide it, they get error messages. It is
> not limited to one or two users, and the errors are the same, leading me to
> believe it may be a bug on your end.
>
> I have a lot of engaged commenters, and I fear the longer this problem persists,
> the more of them I will lose and not get back. Thank you for any insight you can
> provide into resolving this problem. I’ll let my readers, and other bloggers,
> know what solutions you give me.

Their response:

Hi Andra,

As you may know, we have recently made some changes to the commenting feature. In order to protect your identity, if somebody tries to comment using your email address, they will have to log in to the account linked to that email address first.

You can find the official announcement here:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/recent-update-to-commenting?replies=4

This might be a source of issues for people who signed up for a WordPress.com or Gravatar account earlier, but do not remember that they did so, or forgot their password.
Some people also have more than one WordPress.com account, and can get confused when trying to sign in.

If some of your readers still have issues commenting on your site, could you ask them try to log out of their account, clearing their cache and cookies, and log back in? That should solve any conflicts with other WordPress.com accounts they may have.

You can find some detailed instructions on how to clear cache and cookies here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/browser-issues/#clear-your-cache-and-cookies

Do not hesitate to contact us again if you have any other questions.

Best,

Jeremy
WordPress.com | Automattic

Mar 21

26 Comments

An Extra Post – WordPress Comment Craziness

Please pardon the extra post today. Because I am uncertain how many bloggers have had problems making and receiving comments, I wanted to give a more general update on the Recent Comment Unpleasantness at WordPress.

In the forums, I found the following link indicating that they believe the issue to be closed and the bugs fixed.

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/recent-update-to-commenting?replies=4

If you are still having problems making and/or receiving comments, please raise your hand here by attempting to make a comment about your issue.

My remaining issues seem to be the following things, but I want to include any others in yet another contact to the unresponsive Happiness Engineers at WordPress.

  1. My Blogger friends told me as recently as last night that they could not make a comment in any fashion – through logging in to WordPress or Gravatar, through Facebook or through Twitter.
  2. I found several regular, routine commenters in my spam folder. If you’re missing regulars, head over there and check your spam folder. Once you approve them, it seems to correct the problem with those accounts.
  3. A couple of my commenters tell me they are still getting caught in a loop when they try to log in to WordPress/Gravatar, making it impossible for them to log in.
  4. Commenters have problems making comments from their mobile phones. This happened to me on several of the blogs I read, and it is annoying, because I often take wait time to catch up on blogs and comment with my phone.

Please, if you can comment, list any other issues you’re still seeing and/or having, and I will take a crack at this matter again through Support.

Alternatively, if you’ve found any more recent information about these problems, please post it here for us clueless folks. :)

Mar 19

51 Comments

We Are Having Technical Difficulties

WordPress made some changes to their comment feature last week. Because I don’t read instructions and never follow directions, I was trapped in a bubble of cluelessness about the whole thing until yesterday.

Basically, if you have been commenting on a WordPress blog without a WordPress or Gravatar account, WordPress now requires you to log in with one of those accounts to leave a comment. An override is supposed to be not requiring an email address to comment, but unchecking that box in my discussion settings did not alleviate that problem for my blog.

With technical support closed on the weekends, I was left in a scream-inducing black hole of trying to decipher geek speak in forums when I cannot read geek. The only thing I clearly understood was that the WordPress change still had many bugs, and they are working out the kinks in the system. A real support person will be hearing from me first thing this morning, and I hope to have the issue resolved sometime today.

I love comments, and I would do nothing to make them challenging for you, Dear Reader. If you have been trying to comment on my blog and kept getting an error message, I apologize for the WordPress dysfunction, exacerbated by my obliviousness to it.

And, if any of you other WordPress.com bloggers have discovered a work-around for this nasty problem, please leave a comment and enlighten me. I promise to read it thoroughly, and to follow the directions you take the time to give me.

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