What a day! It turns out the co.mments server had an obscure bug, very simple to fix but also hard to identify. I noticed that bug before, but it happend so infrequently that I couldn’t determine when or why it happens. Today, it started showing up much more frequently on many WordPress blogs.

The bug causes the server to enter an infinite loop, eat up memory and stop processing requests. Tracking a conversation on one of the many blogs that exhibit this behavior caused part of the server to crash, and instead of seeing an error message you would get no response. It happened on too many blogs at once, that all that load caused the entire server to crash repeatedly.

To add insult to injury, the load on the server was so high it would take several minutes to restart, and then a few more minutes to come crashing down. Unfortunately, my attempts to keep it running while fixing the bug only worsened the situation, and the entire site was down for most of the day.

Thankfully, once I found it, the fix was easy. The bug is squashed, co.mments is up and running, speedy and responsive, and has already caught up with all of the day’s comments. No data lost.

We’re back to normal. Thank you for your patience.

I can’t easily decipher the code in scripts.js, but I do know there’s a missing return false; somewhere. If, after it’s done handling the keypress, the script returns false, things like the Quick Find bar in Firefox don’t pop up. It’s a minor annoyance, since I have to wait for the bar to go away before I can hit another shortcut.

In the few months I’ve been a member here, I’ve noticed that the sharing widget given on the Settings page doesn’t do anything. The URL given doesn’t return any code, at all. Despite the fact that my blog already has (arguably) too many widgets in the sidebar, I’d like to share my tracking list. Is the feature broken, or was it never implemented?

Far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth (a free, no-ads comment-tracking service), let alone count its teeth, but –

There seem to have been an inordinate number of proxy errors from co.mments in recent weeks. That’s bad news, inasmuch as I depend on co.mments to keep track of a number of on-line ‘conversations.’

If it’s a question of the cost of more-reliable servers, I’d cheerfully pay a few bucks for the service.

–D. C.

I am a heavy follower of Lifehacker, and as such comment quite a bit on their site. I always add the pages I comment on to my Co.mments list. The problem starts at 100 comments, when the comments are suddenly split across multiple pages. Co.mments does not track correctly across pages, so I end up having to add another entry with “?cpage=2″ (or 3, or 4, or however many comment pages there are). Sometimes I forget, and miss out on some comments for days until I notice that one of the pages is at 100 comments.

I propose that Co.mments get the ability to detect “next page” links. For my Lifehacker example, the pager links are contained in a div with the ID “commentPager”. It may or may not be useful for other sites (though other sites do appear to use the same blogging platform as the LH), but would come as a great enhancement to myself and all the other LH followers here.

I would like to post letting users know that there is a co.mments “custom button” for use with Firefox.

Requirements:

Firefox
Custom Buttons² Extension
co.mments Custom Buttons

I was not the author of the button, so post any comments or questions here

I’ve been happily adding comment threads to track when I realised that I was not getting updates on my RSS feed. I followed through to the co.mments page and realised there were only two comment threads being followed and I was not logged in.

I attempted to log in and was informed that my password didn’t match. Feasible (there was nothing stored in Firefox) but a bit odd. So I clicked on the forgotten password link and was sent a new one. This still comes up with the same error. On the off chance of a temporary glitch, I asked to be sent a second password, which equally didn’t work.

Note that I am able topost this by using OpenID. Will you allow OpenID log ins for co.mments?

Would it be possible to please notify users if they have been logged out so they know they aren’t storing the tracked conversations where they think they are?

Is it possible to find out what’s stopping passwords from being accepted after they are reset?

I have a suggestion for co.mments. A netvibes module. I know that co.mments has a rss feed I could view in Netvibes, but a little netvibes module sure would be nice. Anyone a Netvibes module developer?

For those of us who run a blog or similar service ourselves, it would be nice to add such URIs to our Co.mments account, and automatically have all comment threads on all posts added, and automatically have new posts’ comment threads added, to our Co.mments account. It would be annoying to Co.mment each post right after you write it. ^^/

The quick link bookmark, doesn’t seem to work on IE7 in vista. I’ve been able to add it to my links bar in IE, but it only works about 1 out of 10 times. Anyone else having any luck or other options?

thanks,jb