Site Maintenance: Commenting and Trackbacks

A quick note, if this post actually publishes:

Despite a lull of about 24 hours, problems with the site have continued. (A post I spent hours writing has failed to publish to the site, and the Movable Type interface which caused no problems for about 24 hours is now spitting out the same old errors.)

Over the next 24 hours or so — possibly quite less than that, if we’re lucking — I’m going to attempt a fix which I’m hoping will solve most of the problems. During that period, comments and trackbacks will not work. The problems we’ve been experiencing may be related to how a plugin used to filter out spam in comments and/or trackbacks over-loads FastCGI operation. I’m hoping so, at least. Once the plugin is removed, the template for the commenting page will need to be altered to remove the relevant codes before commenting and trackbacks will be operational. At the moment, I’m unable to access the page for editing that template, because of the overload on FastCGI. I get an error when I attempt to move to the template screen. MT will need to re-set in FastCGI before I’m able to complete the changes, and that can take between 3 & 4 hours.

We will also be moving to requiring TypeKey authentication for commenting:  a slight hassle for would-be commenters, but hopefully not much of a hassle.