Sundries

Trouble Down at t’Blog!

39 Comments

Please respond in comments with the user interface problems you are having and I will look into things.

Life is coming at me rather fast right now so I will be dipping in and out.

39 thoughts on “Trouble Down at t’Blog!”

  1. Viv: I have been having a number of problems. For example:
    1. Sometimes a comment doesn’t post and all that shows is blank.
    2. If I click “home” the post goes to a telstra sign in. Ditto when when I am working on a blog and click on return to site.
    I will record future problems.

  2. Viv, once or twice when I was logged on it told me I was not allowed to see drafts. I usually have a couple of windows open because of my working style, so I just closed that one and went to another, which behaved.

    I’ve been offended by being told at the beginning of last year, as an administrator, that I was not allowed to see statistics. Now there is simply no opportunity for me to see statistics.

    Once when I put in my user name and password, it just kept re-prenting itself for me to do it again.

    I solved that by shutting down and restarting the computer, then it behaved.

    I don’t know how much of this is just lowering standards in the sofware development industry generally.

    My young son, who is a software engineer, but knows nothing about WordPress, tells me there is no incentive in the industry for anyone to get all the bugs out software. And nothing is built from the ground up. It’s always built on stuff that is already there, and the new interacts with the old in unpredictable ways.

    This situation has developed because software development companies struggle to keep up with demand, struggle to find competent staff in the numbers they require (there are plenty incompetent people) they can make money whether they get it right or not, so the priority is often to make money.

  3. Viv, bilb is on Netherlands time, but he said comments wouldn’t take more than one line.

    I have to go to work now, so good luck and much appreciated.

  5. Well it wouldn’t post a copy and pasted text with a link from google sheets, but it did post the previous two short sentences.

  8. bilb, I clicked on ‘edit’ on your 1:00AM comment and your name and email were there.

    I’m confused!

    Have to and water plants again today.

  9. Just remembered, when comments are made there was always the IP address of the commenter, as well as email and name. That no longer seems to be the case.

    Another factor that may be relevant. I use Firefox as a browser. However, some months ago I found I couldn’t access Suncorp bank with Firefox, but could with Chrome.

    I wondered whether that could be a factor in John’s problem with being misdirected to Telstra.

  11. Well it put that part of the comment which was the essential part of my 3 para comment. I wonder if wordpress has been bought by twitter.

  12. Here is a must hear exposition on the nature of the enemy.

    https://youtu.be/L_zQTNrGYVw

    This is the dark money nature of political corruption in the US, corruption that overflows to impact people around the world through Conservative attacks on Climate Action.

  13. Here is a must hear exposition on the nature of the enemy.

    https://youtu.be/L_zQTNrGYVw

    This is the dark money nature of political corruption in the US, corruption that overflows to impact people around the world through Conservative attacks on Climate Action. The money from these lobby organisation support a global network of “influencers”, word soldiers I’ve heard termed “ ”, who work to disrupt discussion supporting Climate Action in social media sites and discussion blogs.

  14. OK

    It seems there is a problem with words containing the 10th letter of the alphabet accompanying some following letters.

    10 21 14 17 25

    Hé who shall not be named!

  16. Interesting, I use Safari most of the time on iPhone and I don’t seem to have the problem you guys are talking about.
    Link test, pertinent essay I picked up of a Guardian Selected Comment

    What has Posterity Ever Done for Me!

    Ever since the edit and all other buttons disappeared, I have to fill in my name and email address for each comment . Where as before it would auto fill when I loaded the C+ page. Not sure what happened, but can live with it.

  17. I use Firefox so let’s see what happens when I try to comment.
    Blah, blah, blah (wish I had something intelligent to say). It would be interesting if in blocking the Voldemort from North Queensland the block doesn’t just affect the pest logging in, but any reference to it.

  18. Not sure where all that gets us. Certainly the dark web, big tech monopolies, web attacks, cyber security etc are not exactly under control, and probably never will be, to the detriment of humanity. Include bitcoin in that.

    However, I’ve always thought we should fly under the radar. Surely no-one could be bothered with something as insignificant as C+.

    Bilb tells me he thinks it could be a word filter problem. On investigation I find that under ‘Disallowed comments’ it’s not just commenters and email addresses that are banned, but nominated words which appear in comments, together with words within words, eg “word” and “press” within WordPress.

    If so, we’ve had just a few that Viv put there since the beginning – commenters who had been problematic at LP.

    Maybe, I stirred it up when I added to it and hit “save changes”. If so, it will play up with the following and more:

      liar

      on

      the

      bus

      irish

      tin

      mail

      seed

      paint

    Just can’t see that to be the case. See what Viv thinks.

    Any way, I’ve taken the “j” word out.

  19. What is this zoot? You don’t think people find blah, blah, blah, .. interesting. I for one take every blah seriously. It is not just the expression, it is also the tempo, syntax, refrain, meter, diction and even alliteration. There is so much to be appreciated in “blah, blah, blah” not to mention compression and brevity. Some people prefer “blah blah blah de blah blah blah, …… Blah”, but I can get very excited by a well phrased, “blah blah blah”. Please don’t ever think you have nothing of value to say.

  21. Viv emailed me early today. She’s working this weekend (someone has to do it!), but is on the case, and I’m very hopeful we’ll get a good outcome.

  24. I was thinking of some of my favorite blahs from the past, zoot.
    Of course there is Blah Blah Black Sheep, and another I heard on the radio just yesterday, Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blahbaran. More will come to mind.

  25. Hello all, thanks for providing various details although I’m really not sure there’s a single coherent thread for me to follow.

    I’m going for a morning walk and when I return will put the site into Maintenance Mode for an hour or so and run some diagnostics, perhaps change to a newer theme to eliminate possible coding conflicts between WordPress versions (so it will look a bit different when it returns).

    I can’t guarantee all the old features can be reinstated. Some of them relied on plugins that haven’t been updated for years, and since I’ve taken on a non-coding job I’m no longer in the zeitgeist for tweaking stuff the way I was. I shall however endeavour to do my best!

  26. Hi John, have changed comments settings to nested replies so I can reply to individual issues more specifically.

    1. There is a filter setting for some words commonly used by spammers. If you compose your comment in an external word editor and then copy it into the blog, you can then send the text to Brian for any comments that don’t make it through and he can send it through to me.

    2. I can’t replicate that ‘Home’ button problem in my browser. There doesn’t seem to be any code inserted into the back-end that would make that happen. I’m curious to see how often that happens too.

  27. It is often worthwhile to simply restart one’s computer if having persistent page-loading or click-fail problems of any kind.

    There do seem to be persistent attempts by impersonators to log in as one of the writers in this blog which are blocked by security software. It may sometimes appear overly officious if any one of you perhaps mistypes your password more than once – it will then lock you out for an hour. If that happens then best to write your post up in a normal editor and wait out the timeout.

    The statistics were part of a plugin, they are not native to WP on its own (they once were, but they changed). I have activated a plugin that should show statistics to you but it will be starting from scratch rather than recovering older data.

  29. Hi tigtog

    It’s been a long time since I headed up a comment with that phrase. The problem for me arose from my use of the word _umpies which I copied and pasted with each attempt to have the comment vanish. It wasn’t till i progressively rebuilt the multi para comment section by section that identified the cause.

    Now it is working fine for me.

    Wish list: it would be great to have a “jump to top” button and for there to be a page in home on how to use html features.

    Kind regards bilb2

  30. Sorry I wasn’t here for the fun.

    Viv, my preference is still for numbered comments, but that may not be possible.

    I’ve noticed the email notification is there, which is good.

    I’m still wondering whether updating to the new WordPress 5.8 might be good idea. Against that, I’ve often found updated versions of software worse for me to operate than the old ones, but I might be showing my age.

  31. Hi bilb2, glad that the major problem for you has disappeared.

    How deliciously old-school a “jump to top” button would be. I’ll have to go on a deep dive to find that one but will see what I can do.

    I’ll see if I can find an How-to-HTML page to link to for you.

  32. Administrators can see various details of users (including IP addresses) via the back-end admin pages of the site, but not from the front end. They’re certainly all visible to me right now.

    Different browsers may be doing different things indeed.

  33. I do plan to upgrade the site to the latest version of WordPress soon. It shouldn’t make for too many obvious changes in anything to do with writing articles or comments.

    I’ll dig into my archives to remember how to sort out numbered comments and see if I can make it happen. In the meantime, there’s a timestamp next to each comment. You could always add something like re Brian’s comment August 16, 2021 at 11:08 pm, and then others could find it. A bit of a faff, but still very clear which comment is meant.

  34. Ooh, we now have a Jump to Top button! As you start scrolling down from the heading, a circle will appear in the bottom-right corner with an Up-Arrow in it.

    Click on the Arrow and it will take you back to the top of the page you were on.

  35. P.S. the timestamp next to each comment automatically includes a permalink to that comment, so it’s already possible to write “As Brian said above funiculi funicula etc” and people can click to read.

  37. That’s totally awesome, togtog. You are a genius. That little arrow makes commenting rapid fire on multiple threads so much easier.

    We hope to see you throw in the occasional comment here. I recall being “put right” by you any number of times, …. and I miss that.

  38. bilb, agree, awesome.

    However, like my son Mark, many of Tigtog’s generation have migrated to Twitter.

  39. I had a look at the back end of the blog, and deduced that we’d upgraded to WordPress 5.8, and just now received an email from host Dreamhost confirming that we had.

    Well done, tigtog!

    I’ve also now got no spam under Comments but it’s all going into Feedback.

    Now I also have stats, with a big gap to early last year.

    There aren’t silent hoards, but we still have 20 or so subscribers to the email feed. If they read stuff that way it doesn’t show up in the stats.

    And a couple of hits each for old faithfuls Deep Origins:language and brother Len’s A journey of ‘Bahnisch’ family discovery in Lower Silesia, Poland.

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