Commenting On

My host has moved the main MT interface back to regular cgi from FastCGI, and I’ve been able to access core features and tweak the site further. The removal of additional plugins necessitated revisions to the page templates — a none-too difficult task, since I’d already revised them to remove a lot of plugin activity during rebuilds — but most aspects of the blog should appear as before.

Commenting and trackbacks are back online. However, some changes to the way these work on D5GW were required due to the removal of one plugin that filtered spam:

• TypeKey authentication is now required for comments.* I may have to tweak the settings still, because MT is now automatically inserting another message: that new commenters may have their comments moderated until they can be approved. I meant to change the settings so that Typekey users would have their comments posted immediately; and that may still occur. If using TypeKey and your comments are held for moderation, I’ll be able to go into the system and set your commenting status to “trusted” which should allow immediate posting of comments in the future.
• All trackbacks will be moderated for approval. This is unfortunate, but even with the old plugins, the site received a lot of bad trackbacks which the system sent into “junk status.” I check trackbacks (and comments) quite regularly, so any left on the site that aren’t spam should post rather quickly.

In addition to these changes, a few others:

Recently, an automatic email notice for new posts and new comments to specified posts had been added to the site, but it’s no longer available. Sorry. That was another plugin I’ve deleted from the system. Unlike many other plugin deletions, however, this decision resulted from a worrying thread of comments on a couple of other sites related to the possibility that spammers were somehow accessing the plugin, on some sites, and adding email address after email address, until thousands of notifications for new posts and comments were being sent out to unsuspecting recipients. I had actually purchased a use license for the plugin, so this is irritating; but perhaps a future version will be safe for use.

Site news like this last string of posts will now appear as links in the right sidebar of the main page of D5GW. As long as the site is working, I see no need to detract from the discussion of 5GW with endless site notices. Especially those I write: they’re so long! A permanent link in the heading of the section in the sidebar will lead to a search of all posts tagged “Site Notice”, even if no new news appears there, for anyone wanting to backtrack through developments.

Entry tags have replaced category and monthly archives. This is a new feature with Movable Type 3.3x, and it may be one of my favorites. Visitors rarely used the archives to search through sites, anyway; and the categories were too broad; so a lot of trudging was required when searching for specific post. (Why not use the search function? I’ve wondered.) Plus, rebuilds of the category and monthly archive pages took a lot of system resources, particularly given the fact that two blogs are hosted on my server space. Most old entries haven’t yet been “tagged”, so not all will show up — yet — through tag searches; but you can click the linked tags below posts that have them to find similarly tagged entries.

Finally, I write this notice with a little trepidation, because I don’t know how long the good times will last. My host is rather insistent about having everyone on the server (over 300!) use FastCGI, and I’m not sure if trying to run the main MT interface over FastCGI at a future date will nullify all of the improvements I’ve recently made in my attempts to optimize the site. Comments and the search feature will continue to be fed through FCGI; they are the biggest server hogs for any blog. (Irritating that so many nameless spammers can have this downstream effect. I suffer no problems in two years of ‘residence’ at this host — heck, even have two small-time, relatively nameless blogs — and swarms of spammers cause this kind of grief.)

Everything works right now; but later? Stay tuned. My greatest apologies to our regular core of visitors, for any frustration this has caused; and my thanks to those who have written me privately to offer their support.

[Originally posted March 8, 2007]

*UPDATE 3-15-07:  Be sure to set your TypeKey account to pass your email address when commenting.  This is an option which can or cannot be set in TypeKey, but D5GW requires an email address for posting comments.

Anyone still having problems commenting should send an email to “static” + “@” + this site’s address (fifthgeneration.phaticcommunion.com).

*UPDATE 3-18-07: A missing perl module was causing TypeKey sign-ins from the site to return an error; but the problem has been fixed. However, anyone who has logged in recently may need to reload a comment page or clear the cache, since the commenting script was briefly run through cgi rather than FastCGI, is now back on FastCGI, and the links for commenting and for signing in or out through TypeKey will have changed back and forth during this period.