New TBP Comments Plumbing

The little name-forgetting kerfluffle in the comments recently made me take a new look at a new comment plugin that I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind to try on the site. It has a lot of invisible plumbing-level advantages for the site. And maybe also some visible ones.

I’m about to turn it on and re-configure things. You will notice. I don’t know if it will be better, worse, or just different, so consider this an experiment and use the comments on this post to say what you think and / or note any kind of showstoppers.

Here’s one thing that is different, and I think, better. To add an image to a comment, just paste in the link. No “click here” button, no “[img]”, just paste the link to the image into the comment and it should render as an image.

If this new plumbing totally sucks, or causes unforeseen problems, we’ll go back to what we had before. If it has some promise but some things need tweaking, we can try tweaking. It has a lot of settings to customize.

Give it a try for a while and then comment below.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another thing I wanted to call out about how the new plumbing works. The comments are now loaded into the page via AJAX (javascript) without having to re-load the page (this is one of the nice things from a server load point of view). If you leave a page with comments open in your browser, it should update with any new comments automatically every 30 seconds. New ones you haven’t seen yet have a light green background until you mouse over them.

EDIT 2: Evaluating and tweaking on the fly. The “live reload” feature is putting some load on the server, so I changed it from every 30 seconds to every minute to see if that makes it less of a burden. If not, may have to turn that feature off.

EDIT 3: There was some wonkiness with video embedding being kind of hit and miss. Admin plunked down a few $ for an add-on to the commenting plugin that makes it work better for videos and it seems like it is working better now. Please comment if still seeing any issues embedding video.

EDIT 4: As far as I can tell, the issues with embedding youtube, vimeo, etc videos were solved by the addition of the add-on. There are a lot of video services out there that don’t support embedding and there is nothing we can do about that.

Some people are still apparently having problems embedding images from some image hosting sites. I explained what I think that problem is in a comment below, re-posted here:

What happens when you paste in a URL that ends in .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, etc is that the commenting plugin just wraps it with the html necessary to display it. That’s exactly the same thing that the old comment image button did as well. The only difference is that you had to press a button with the old one and this new one just auto-detects image URLs and does the conversion automatically.

The problem you are having is that the services you are trying to use, like imgur, are trying to monetize what they are doing so instead of giving you a real, direct link to an image, they are giving you something that looks like a real direct link to an image but when it hits their server, instead of sending back the image, they are sending back a bunch of html that puts their logo and links to their page around the image. This is to get people to click on the image and go to their site where they can show ads and make money. That fuckery (which they are doing) is what is causing the problem.

I don’t know whether postimages will go the same way or not, but for now, they are not fucking with the direct link – it sends back an image. I don’t know where you are going when you try to use postimages, but this is where I uploaded the image above: https://postimages.org/

native advertising

Postimages seems to work correctly for me. If you want to upload an image to a service and get a direct link that you can paste into a comment here, try them.

EDIT 5: It looks like the live reload feature is putting a lot of extra load on the server. I’m going to let it go for a couple days and see if that settles down. If not, I’ll try turning it off and seeing if the new commenting plugin still seems worthwhile without that.

EDIT 6: I’ve tweaked a few things this morning (8/8) to try to get site subscriptions working more reliably and to make the new commenting system play nicely with the site’s automated spam suppression.

I hope that everyone who is subscribed by email to the site will get emails for new posts (after “Apple, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter Subvert the US Constitution, Free Speech, and American Liberty”). Let me know if still not receiving them after that post.

The spam catching thing will take a while to shake out, so give it some time and let’s see if it settles down. Nobody is being moderated. Just machines doing what we programmed them to do and not being able to do what we want them to do perfectly.

EDIT 7: I think that many problems people are having are a consequence of their browsing having cached versions of the javascript code used by the new commenting system before I made some changes to it. If that’s right, the solution is to clear that old code out of the browser cache. Here is a page with instructions on how to clear your browser cache for different browsers and different versions of them: Refresh Your Cache.

UPDATE (8/9): I know that some people are still having some problems posting comments sometimes. As far as I can tell, this mainly seems to be happening when trying to reply to another comment (and not when using the main comment form to post a “top-level” comment).

What’s happening is that the spam protection is bouncing these reply comments. I am trying to figure out why it is happening just to some people and not to others. Unfortunately, I can’t make it happen for me so I can’t see in detail what is happening when it happens. I just see that it happened in the log of the spam protection.

I’ve reached out to the authors of the new commenting system to see if they can help figure it out.

Aside from whatever I (and they) can figure out, try clearing your browser cache and cookies (Refresh Your Cache) and if you are using an old version of your browser, upgrade to the latest available (that’s good advice period – not just for this issue. Keep your browser up to date both for security and functionality).

In case anyone is paying attention, I’ve turned off the live update feature for the time being because I think it has been causing a large usage of the server resources.

Update (8/10): Still no word from the authors of the comment plugin about the issue I reported. I’ve turned off some of the anti-spam measures that I think are getting in the way of people being able to reply to other people’s comments. Let’s see if that fixes the problem without opening the spam floodgates…