Comment problems at Catallaxy Files

Comment problems

87 comments

Some of you are having problems with the sidebar getting out of sync with comments in discussion threads.

Can you comment below as to whether this is a problem for you, and tell us your ISP.

Written by Jacques Chester

September 18th, 2012 at 10:43 am

Posted in Site News

87 Responses to 'Comment problems'

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Comment

Lysander Spooner

18 Sep 12 at 10:47 am
Seems fine to me.

Lysander Spooner

18 Sep 12 at 10:47 am
Who’s your ISP?

Jacques Chester

18 Sep 12 at 10:49 am
As you know the “recent comments” mostly doesn’t update. Same for the comments rss. Telstra isp.

Gab

18 Sep 12 at 10:54 am
Also, the number of comments listed directly under the individual post headlines doesn’t always update when viewing from the main Catallaxy page.

Gab

18 Sep 12 at 10:56 am
Me too.

ISP: SpinTel

JamesK

18 Sep 12 at 10:59 am
And me.
ISP is Telstra.

The Hunted Mind

18 Sep 12 at 11:03 am
Me too, Skymesh

Helen Armstrong

18 Sep 12 at 11:13 am
I lie, it seems to be working ok this morning, yesterday was a bit dodgy. Cheers

Helen Armstrong

18 Sep 12 at 11:31 am
The individual pages are updating, but the front page is not.

Helen Armstrong

18 Sep 12 at 11:51 am
No probs.

blogstrop

18 Sep 12 at 12:28 pm
And me sometimes.
ISP is Telstra.

stackja

18 Sep 12 at 12:30 pm
What is “sidebar”?

Ooh Honey Honey

18 Sep 12 at 12:36 pm
Test

Steve D

18 Sep 12 at 1:05 pm
Seems to be working for me, although I think yesterday the “Recent comments” was lagging behind the actual situation. (Coming at you via some big company portal in Singapore.)

@Ooh Honey Honey 18 Sep 12 at 12:36 pm:
As long as the sidebar provides the same service as the main bar, all should be fine. They may have a smaller range of beverages, though.

Steve D

18 Sep 12 at 1:08 pm
I had a strange experience this morning, a post that I put up on the Patrick White exhibition following Deja Vu went strange and disappeared. I thought it was trashed by someone from Melbourne who took offence at the content.

Poor Old Rafe

18 Sep 12 at 1:16 pm
This is not my area of expertise, but I believe you have a caching problem. I’ve been looking at the HTTP headers that get sent and received in the browser. (How to watch HTTP headers in Google Chrome.) I notice that the server is sending back this response header to the browser:

Cache-Control:max-age=7200, must-revalidate

What does it mean? It says that the web browser can cache the page for up to 7200 seconds (2 hours). It also means that any intermediate web caches can hang on to the page for 2 hours.

I think that’s why people are seeing stale pages.

If the user clicks on an internal link on the site, and they have a cached copy in the browser or some intermediate web cache that is less than 2 hrs old, the browser will just display that cached version.

If the user clicks the refresh button in the browser (or presses f5 or whatever), then that should probably force a fresh page to be returned.

Another wrinkle is that there is web cache called Varnish at page.ly. Presumably it is set up appropriately. Maybe it is even integrated with WordPress. I don’t know if you get any control over that or not.

Anyway, like I said, I’m not an expert, but I reckon if you changed the Cache-Control header to this (for the actual page, not unchanging resources like CSS files), then that would fix at least some of the problems:

Cache-Control:max-age=0, must-revalidate

Dangph

18 Sep 12 at 1:21 pm
Are there any major sites that use page.ly? Ones that have lots of comments like the cat?

Dangph

18 Sep 12 at 1:27 pm
Frequently during the day, the entire site still simply will not load and several attempts are required.

Mind you, this has been going on for some time (weeks), so not sure if it is just a problem at my end.

But today, comments are not updating always either.

ISP is Netspace.

steve from brisbane

18 Sep 12 at 1:34 pm
Sorry Monsier Jacques but I don’t know who our ISP is!!!! (typical public servant)

Lysander Spooner

18 Sep 12 at 1:35 pm
Jacques, irregular updating of comments sidebar. Telstra is ISP.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

18 Sep 12 at 1:59 pm
Stop it Steve C. There is one glass of a decent Shiraz left from last night in that bottle, and it is now looking at me from the sideboard. I never drink at lunchtime unless I am encouraged in some way. The pasta I just had was pretty disgusting and a wee tipple might help digest it?

Hey Jacques, on this thread I am not getting the useful page view of the comment either before I submit it, just the working typeface box.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

18 Sep 12 at 2:09 pm
ooops. Steve D not C.

Jacques, page view prior to submit is now working.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

18 Sep 12 at 2:12 pm
Thank you for asking, sometimes “connection cannot be trusted” comes up but it’s no big deal, just in the last few days I think

candy

18 Sep 12 at 2:15 pm
“connection cannot be trusted”

yes I get that often, along with a cannot connect (timeout) page from the Cat’s host.

Gab

18 Sep 12 at 2:20 pm
Jacques, suddenly, all seems to be right with the world Chez Chat Internet Lizzie. Everything as it should be. And I haven’t even started on that Shiraz yet.

Gab – in the past, even to yesterday, I had the same trust and timout page coming up a bit. Not today though.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

18 Sep 12 at 2:23 pm
suddenly, all seems to be right with the world Chez Chat Internet Lizzie.

That happened yesterday to me, Lizzie. It appears to be intermittent.

Gab

18 Sep 12 at 2:26 pm
Well, I do have to report that the glass of Shiraz was chimeric. Just a glint of the light. The damn bottle was essentially empty, yet I am sure that there was a glass left when I went to bed. The usual suspect, I expect. Words will be spoken tonight, but Irish blandishments usually win out over an Aussie shiela’s derision.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

18 Sep 12 at 2:35 pm
I spend a great deal of time crafting my comments, checking spelling and deleting rude words. After I press submit, the comment comes out as meaningless rot. It’s your sever.

Pickles

18 Sep 12 at 4:54 pm
Well, I must say that Pickles’ post appeared in the new commentary side-bar a good 10 minutes before it appeared in this thread.

Strange.

Can I haz some Sumerian Mead the next time you go travelling, Pickles?

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 5:01 pm
et tu, Pickles?
All fine here – ISP = Bluemaxx (Guvvie job)

Bob Sewell

18 Sep 12 at 5:04 pm
Don’t you bloody well start on the Sumerian Mead thing, Kaboom.
I got away from the Blairites because of the never ending carousing.

Bob Sewell

18 Sep 12 at 5:07 pm
I should elaborate – my private ISP is iinet, and it works perfectly, although the number of comments on the main thread is out of whack with the actual number (greater) on the specific sub-thread.

For instance, when I re-entered this sub-thread to post this message, the main board said 29 comments, my comment above was #30, and the lede for this sub-thread was 31 comments, given Bob’s above.

Bob also appears on the “recent comments” side-bar, so all is good.

Looks like a caching issue.

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 5:10 pm
Can’t post at all- your clock seems way off. Tried two different browsers and even tried posting through TOR with no joy. I’m with iinet.

Cold-Hands

18 Sep 12 at 5:22 pm
Telstra here, but I am still at war with them about no 3G email service on iPhone, so don’t worry too much. I have been cutting down a telstra tower a day with a hacksaw with no noticeable affect.

And no mead. Those of us Blairbillies who survived the mead and burnout wars and the lake stealing caper are TPI from PTSD and VD.

Pickles

18 Sep 12 at 5:27 pm
Damn!

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 5:29 pm
Pickles, how does one actually utilise a:

“hacksaw with no noticeable Effect”

Enquiring minds want to know….

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 5:34 pm
Enquiring minds want to know….

Indeed; that reads like praise for telstra’s coverage, and the rational part of my brain just can’t accept that…

Supplice

18 Sep 12 at 5:50 pm
Kaboom, Pickles it’s me, Winston Smith. You’ll also find Mick From Brisbane around at times.
Look under the lounge…

Bob Sewell

18 Sep 12 at 5:55 pm
Still can’t post on the open forum or “free speech” threads. Get a Catallaxy screen saying “connection problem”.

Cold-Hands

18 Sep 12 at 6:10 pm
Can post once I removed links from my posting. Sidebar still unsynced.

Cold-Hands

18 Sep 12 at 6:17 pm
Eventually I’ll get the one they’re actually using. In respect of the e or a at the start of ffect what is the proper use?

Pickles

18 Sep 12 at 6:50 pm
In Moderation. The Final Insult. But mindful that it is free, my tolerance is pretty much boundless. It will take as long as it takes.

Pickles

18 Sep 12 at 6:56 pm
Nope it runs hot and cold & i’m using both Telstra and Optus in Oz and Asahi-net in Japan.

Carpe Jugulum

18 Sep 12 at 7:40 pm
Working fine for me, isp: 3BB Thailand.

Yobbo

18 Sep 12 at 8:11 pm
Bigpond.

Still have the last comment as

Poor Old Rafe

18 Sep 12 at 7:17 pm

On the side…

Also name and email don’t stick.

JC

18 Sep 12 at 8:14 pm
“Kaboom, Pickles it’s me, Winston Smith. You’ll also find Mick From Brisbane around at times.”

Sock Puppet!!1!1!!

Yo, Winston!

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 8:51 pm
By the way, Sock Puppet, you will (I think) find that it’s “Mick From Gold Coast”, and “Fuckwit From Brisbane”.

FIFY.

Kaboom

18 Sep 12 at 8:55 pm
I have this lag effect with comment counts and the sidebar.
ISP: iinet.

dd

18 Sep 12 at 9:03 pm
My biggest problem are “untrusted connection” messages, requiring site-specific exceptions to see particular threads. There doesn’t appear to be any pattern.

Jarrah

18 Sep 12 at 9:16 pm
Dangph;

Maybe, and that’s why I was inquiring after ISPs (they pretty much all run caching proxies).

Page.ly run sites with far more traffic, but they’re making a bit of noise about the number of comments that the Cat has. About 400k in the database since coming to Ozblogistan, which gums up some works — potentially it’s related to the sidebar problem because the “recent comments” widget causes a relatively slow lookup on the table.

I’ve suggested that they partition the underlying table by date and they’ve suggested that I pay $$$ so that they will run a few lines of SQL.

It’s an … ongoing discussion.

Jacques Chester

18 Sep 12 at 9:48 pm
I do notice that when there are a lot of people commenting, the site really takes ages to load. Like now.

Gab

18 Sep 12 at 10:01 pm
Jacques, one possibility for the database change might be to just pay them the money and raise it through something like kickstarter.

Dangph

18 Sep 12 at 10:22 pm
I suggest a lamington drive.

Pickles

18 Sep 12 at 10:44 pm
comments are not properly updated on the main page. ISP: iinet.

Boris

19 Sep 12 at 1:28 am
I imagine you can see our IP addresses when we submit our comments, Jacques. Why not use a tool like http://www.ip2location.com/ to identify our ISPs for yourself?

For me, I have had comment updating/caching issues with this site from multiple internet devices on both Mac and PC platforms using multiple ISPs, leading me to believe that the problem is not my end but your end.

Steampunk Cat?

sdog

19 Sep 12 at 2:11 am
Page.ly run sites with far more traffic, but they’re making a bit of noise about the number of comments that the Cat has.

User pays? Reading the blog stays free; but charge a nominal fee per comment, have anyone who wants their comments published immediately upon submission pre-pay for the privilege in blocks of 5 to 500 comments. Award a “comment of the day” prize which comes with a gift certificate for xx number of free comments.

Avoid google ads at all costs though – not only does google suck, but most smart people use ad-blocker add-ons anyway.

sdog

19 Sep 12 at 2:23 am
N.B. Here’s a screencap of my current view of the Cat, as at 2:58am AEST: http://ScrnSht.com/whljch

You’ll see that the comment counts on the posts are not current, and the most recent comment listed in the sidebar is Boris’ from 1:21am AEST.

This is directly after a cache/cookies clear and system reboot, using Firefox 15.0.1, a Win7Pro Intel ultrabook and routing through a private server farm just outside San Diego, CA.

sdog

19 Sep 12 at 3:10 am
The sidebar ‘recent comments’ is stuck on September 15 for me.

ISP – Southernphone

Ellen of Tasmania

19 Sep 12 at 7:18 am
The latest from the host is that this is expected behaviour — their front end cache (Varnish) is caching each page independently.

On my own server the caching was invalidated whenever a comment was posted, which is why things were generally up to date. But Varnish is a different program and works a bit differently.

However they’ve made a suggestion about a Varnish feature (ESIs, to the knowledgeable) which I guess I will need to investigate.

Jacques Chester

19 Sep 12 at 10:03 am
Thank you for keeping us updated on the situation, Jacques.

Gab

19 Sep 12 at 10:08 am
I’ve installed a plugin that ostensibly modifies the sidebar output to do the ESI voodoo.

Let me know if you notice any improvement.

Jacques Chester

19 Sep 12 at 10:23 am
It is working on my browser now Jacques.

Thank you.

JamesK

19 Sep 12 at 10:31 am
to do the ESI voodoo.

Not working. Still the same results for me, Jacques. Sorry.

Gab

19 Sep 12 at 10:32 am
Looks like it was the wrong plugin for the job.

I’ve tried a different setting, let me know how it goes.

Jacques Chester

19 Sep 12 at 11:19 am
As of about 11.05am browser is hanging on:-
0.1.2.gravatar.com
i1,i2.ytimg.com

ISP aaNet.

Rudiau

19 Sep 12 at 11:24 am
I’m having gravatar trouble too, but we don’t control that.

Jacques Chester

19 Sep 12 at 11:32 am
Jacques, sometimes the side bar and the comments rss update, sometimes they don’t . I can’t see any improvement since you installed the plugin. Sorry.

Gab

19 Sep 12 at 1:22 pm
The site seems to be taking longer to load, but that could just be a coincidence.

Gab

19 Sep 12 at 1:24 pm
No.

The sidebar is way behind actual comments again.

JamesK

19 Sep 12 at 1:38 pm
I haven’t been keeping up. Too busy looking for the Chinese Navy sailing in the Whitsundays. Seen plenty of whales, dolphins and sea turtles but no Chinese submarines. Will keep looking!

John Comnenus

19 Sep 12 at 2:07 pm
Everything working foine and dandy for me now, Jacques.
If you suddenly disappear John C, say hello to old Harold Holt for us, won’t you?

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

19 Sep 12 at 3:55 pm
Kaboom, kae will vouch for the authenticity of the Winston/Bob transformation…
I hope.

Bob Sewell

19 Sep 12 at 6:46 pm
Another day another tower. Eventually I’ll get the one their actually using. My clresponse to questions posed up thread have been quarantined. The blog equivalent of insulting the prophet. Sans you tube.

Pickles

19 Sep 12 at 10:27 pm
Winston. If your still working in bush health up Curry did your coming out follow the result of the election?

Pickles

19 Sep 12 at 10:39 pm
Some of you are having problems with the sidebar getting out of sync with comments in discussion threads.

Actually Jacques,

Some of us are having lots of problems at this site. lol.

Alex Pundit

19 Sep 12 at 11:32 pm
What is “sidebar”?

The thing you get your drinks from in the hotel room. I constantly have problems with it.

Alex Pundit

19 Sep 12 at 11:33 pm
Different ISP (WildBlue), same problems. Comments still munted.

sdog

20 Sep 12 at 6:22 am
Jacques, how come every time I put up my patrick white exhibition post it wipes out my previous post?

Three times now, starting Saturday.

Poor Old Rafe

20 Sep 12 at 7:55 am
Still no sighting of the Chinese navy. Am starting a new sweep up past Whitsunday and Hook Islands and on to Hayman Island. Didn’t see any subs but we had three humpback whales, including a calf, come within 5m of the yacht in Dent Channel. Needless to say, life is good!

John Comnenus

20 Sep 12 at 9:47 am
Jacques, just got thrown off with a ‘connection error’ screen when I posted a comment, but comment got up. As before, had to go back into Explorer to get in again. Have had recent problems with Telstra so maybe it is them.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

20 Sep 12 at 11:26 am
Sidebar comments are not updating. ISP is Bigpond.

DavidLeyonhjelm

20 Sep 12 at 11:27 am
Some hilarious happenstances this morning, Jacques.

Rabz posts comments but the name and gravatar comes up as if Monty was posting the comment. So we have this hilarious situation where it looks as though monty is arguing and berating himself.

Lizzie has experienced the same with her comments appearing as though she is Alfonso commenting.

Gab

20 Sep 12 at 11:44 am
Funny thing, when I’m in the Islam thread, my name/mail boxes under “leave a reply’ sees me as Lizzie but on this thread the boxes have my details. Some serious gremlins out & about today.

Gab

20 Sep 12 at 11:48 am
Jaques, strange things happening with comments appearing under other peoples names. Their email addresses are also appearing, very very dangerous I think.

Gab

20 Sep 12 at 11:49 am
Jacques I just put the piece below onto a comment I made, because the previous one turned up attributed to Alfonso. I think it was me when I pressed Submit.
(Is Islam trying to tell me something?)

Now my Reply box says I am GAB, and gives me Gab’s email (which I have also deleted without noting).

Who will I turn into next?

This will do my head in, to say nothing of the emotions of those who may be attributed to engaging with Da Hairy Irish Ape.

I have to pack for the weekend soon so probably won’t be commenting much if at all in the next few days; hope problem is over by the time I return and that it isn’t affecting others in the same way.

—–
Lizzie’s agonised yelp on Martin Luther thread:

HELP HELP HELP. I didn’t notice, but in my reply box I HAVE FOR SOME REASON JUST TURNED INTO ALFONSO. Quick and unwanted sex change there – and Alfonso, rest assured I have deleted your email address without noting it, and I hope anyone who gets to be me (poor you) will do the same.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.

20 Sep 12 at 11:50 am
Gab, that last comment was by me. I have inadvertently acquired your email address. Luckily one of the resident trolls has not come across it.

Huckleberry Chunkwot

20 Sep 12 at 11:52 am

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