Tuesday, December 30, 2008

A Word About "Recent Comments"

I went looking through some of Blogger's Help stuff and found out that this feature is broken pretty much everywhere in Blogger. There's a couple of different threads complaining about it and someone from Blogger showed up to say they're working on it...but no elaboration in the last day or two.

One person said that the widget stops working when it clocks your 5000th comment. I have no idea, but theoretically it'll either start working again soon or Blogger will notify of a fix.

9 comments:

Janiece said...

Strangely enough, Eric's code is working.

Eric...oh, Eric! Where did you get your recent comments code?

Nathan said...

That's weird. A bunch of the folks over on the Blogger thread (and I have little understanding of these things), were saying that they'd tried a variety of codes but the problem was with the feeds from Blogger, so it didn't matter which codes you used.

Eric must be magical. (but we knew that)

Eric said...

When this problem first cropped up, I wondered how I'd managed to be so lucky. And then I noticed my comments sidebar has a "Add This Widget To Your Blog" link to this widget at Blogger Buster and realized that, no, it was just that at some point in the past I'd added that comments widget instead of the Blogger widget (either it was before Blogger introduced their comments widget, or the one at Blogger Buster had some functionality I preferred, or something).

But I'm still magical in other ways... no, really! Where are you going! Do you want to see a trick? Wait!

Awwwwww.

Nathan said...

Eric,

I just tried that one and it gave the most recent comment as Aug 29.

Jim Wright said...

Nathan, same here.

As I recall, we were all fooling around with different comment widgets at the time, somebody found that one at BB. Mentioned it. And a couple of us switched over to it. I did. And mine quit working too.

I've tried a number of fixes. None work. The RSS/ATOM reeds are not broken exactly, but bent anyway. The reference pointers are all hosed up and and not loading properly. I don't think it has anything to do with the aforementioned 5000 comment limit - which makes absolutely no sense, programatically. 5000 is not a binary order of magnitude, there's no reason why it would be a problem unless somebody actually set it as a limit. In which case it would be easy to find. And on top of which, a set threshold for comments assumes that everybody hit the threshold about the same time - i.e. roughly the beginning of this month or so. Um, sorry, don't think so.

Again, sounds like a failure to properly initialize the feed pointers. However, since Eric's feed is working, obviously this doesn't apply to all blogs on blogger. Which makes me think it's specific to a server farm.

I suspect somebody reset the size of a dynamic buffer. Or made a dynamic buffer static. Or ran out of memory space for a dynamic buffer and has been ignoring the error messages for a month.

whatever it is, it's annoying as all hell.

Eric said...

Hang on a sec...

You guys didn't sacrifice your goat this month, did you?

Well, no wonder Blogger is pissed at all of you. He doesn't get his monthly fix of nekkid-dancing and prayer-chanting and goat-killin', He gets ornery. Since He didn't do anything more than screw up your comments, I guess you all got together and thought killing a chicken and maybe keeping your pants on while you did it was good enough in a recession. Well, think again! Blogger is a temperamental and fickle deity, and he likes his rituals done right the same way he told our blogging ancestors to do it in Lascaux 14,000 years before Jesus. You can't expect Him to be happy with a chicken. Sheesh.

The moon will be full on the 11th. You can all fix your blogs then.

MWT said...

Anne's is still working too. She's using the first one (same as Eric's, I believe), where the comments take a long while to update instead of doing it instantaneously - but at least they're still going. ;)

Nathan said...

Well, like I said, I used Eric's widget and it stopped even further in the past.

Nathan said...

BTW,

I don't think there's anything to that idea about it stopping at 5000 comments. I just went back and added stuff and if that was true my recent comments would have stopped in July.