Monday, November 29, 2010

A reminder note about Blogger's glitchy comment issues

If you try posting a comment, and a window comes up telling you that what you wrote was "too large," ignore it. Your comment almost certainly posted anyway. Blogger is just messed up like that sometimes.

6 comments:

  1. In case anyone is computerally-inclined, and interested, I think I know why this happens.

    When you post a comment, it seems that the "Post comment" button redirects to the blog post, but it has a parameter with it. This parameter is your message, base-64 encoded. It does this so that it can display your comment right away, even before it's had a chance to load it into wherever it saves it. That way, you don't have to wait (potentially) several seconds before it redirects. URLs have a length restriction, though, and so if you've written a post that is long enough to overflow the url, it simply cuts off the rest of your message. The blog then detects that the 'message' in the url is incomplete, and spits an error at you. However, since the blog software receives your message in a different way than through the url, the comment is still saved in the backend.

    The More You Know™

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  2. Note: if a comment is actually too long, it will tell you that in a little message under the comment submission box. If it tries to refresh and you get a "URL too long" message, THAT's the one that means your comment went through anyway.

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  3. Dude, just do what I did, along with Jen McCreight and John Loftus: switch to Disqus. For one, it allows voting up comments by "liking" them, and it allows comment threading so small discussions don't distract from comments about the main post. Plus it's easy for people to log in either anonymously or with Facebook, OpenID and a host of others.

    But the best thing is that it allows a one-click IP ban of spammers and nutbags. DM was a really pain on my blog, sometimes posting multiple times a day, and since I switched to Disqus and banned a few of his IPs he's been history.

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  4. Sounds interesting. I'll read up on it.

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  5. I've already got a Disqus account for the ex-chrsitian.net website. I've always been very pleased with it. Never a glitch.

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  6. If you press back on your browser when you get the error message, it will usually show you the "your comment has been saved" note.

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