SubscribeWhat’s with all the proxy errors and other unavailability?
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.
Posted by D. C. Toedt in issues on Monday, November 26th, 2007. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Jay Levitt
November 26th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I hate to say it, but I think co.mments.com is pretty much dormant. I haven’t seen any postings from the maintainers in quite a while, no new features, etc., and like you, I’m frequently getting errors and timeouts.
I have some ideas for a better, more flexible, general-purpose RSS/forum/newsgroup scraper/alerter, but (a) it would be bad form to advertise it on a competing site and (b) the odds of it getting off of my “to think about list” and onto my accomplishments list are, well…
Assaf
November 27th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Step 1: I just deployed a patch (sorry for the downtime), so if you want to use co.mments you have to be a registered user. I like the idea that people don’t have to register to use the service, unfortunately, spammers also like it. Too much.
Step 2: Regular cleanup of the database for old (over 60 days) conversations. There’s just too much data for it to handle, and from what I measured, that’s about how long it takes before it starts hanging up.
Step 3: I also think it needs more memory, working on that as well.
voyagerfan5761
November 29th, 2007 at 11:34 am
No more anonymous tracking? Sounds good. I was kind of wondering about letting people just randomly track conversations with only a fragile cookie to keep the entries together. I applaud your restricting use to registered users, actually.
Regarding step 2, does this mean that conversations that don’t receive replies for two months are deleted, conversations we’ve had in our accounts for over two months, or, um, what?
Assaf
November 29th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
That would mean conversations that received no replies in 2 months, so they will disappear from your tracking list.
voyagerfan5761
November 29th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Ah, OK. Thanks! I guess I’d better get started on a way to log all my conversations, so I don’t lose track of what I’ve posted on the Web. Though I could just ask Google…
SuziQoreogon
December 6th, 2007 at 9:04 am
I’ve been having trouble lately with the bookmarklet returning a message telling me I need to log in when I’m already logged in.
Bottom line - the bookmarklet hasn’t worked correctly for over a week now. I have to copy the url and paste it in on my tracking page to add a conversation.
Could this be related to your Nov. 27th patch??
Assaf
December 6th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
SuziQoreogon, sounds like the Nov patch causes your problem.
Turns out if you uncheck the ‘remember me’ button when you login, sometimes it really doesn’t remember you
I just fixed that. But if I do check this box, I don’t get any problem with the bookmarklet.
I’m trying to understand how to replicate this bug so I can fix it.
suziqoregon
December 7th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Assaf:
Thank you! it’s working now.