For about two months PDD has been having problems with its “Recent Comments” feature — the menu item that highlights which posts have new comments you might not have read.
This week we installed a new plugin for Recent Comments that we hoped would be better, but unfortunately it isn’t.
The old version tended to work perfectly for people who were logged in and had their browsers set to accept cookies galore. For everyone else, which would be a vast majority, it worked poorly.
The new version works the same for everybody — as far as we can tell — but it works poorly for everybody. The two problems with the new version are:
1) It won’t tell you specifically that there are comments you haven’t read, it just lists the posts that have most recently been commented on, whether you’ve read the comments or not.
2) For some reason, if there is a new comment to a post that isn’t one of the 60 most recently posted items, the Recent Comments list won’t highlight it.
Issue #1 is just the way this plugin works, and we accepted that as maybe the best we can do for now, but issue #2 was unexpected, majorly sucks, and makes us think we’ll go back to the previous junky plugin if we can’t fix this issue.
So there you go. We just wanted to let you know why things are stupid right now.
11 thoughts on “The ongoing recent comments issue”
Take a break. Hug it out.
What was wrong with the recent comments section that you guys decided to change in the first place? Can we just go back to that? I have to say that I have decreased my time spent on this site considerably due to the broken function, and I feel like I’m missing out on reading some interesting conversations without it, so I’d love to see it fixed.
I have to agree with wskyline. I’ve kind of, sorta given up and I know I am missing some great comments.
Thanks for the heads up, hope it hasn’t been too frustrating for you guys, and I can’t wait to resume seeing all of the interesting/thoughtful/annoying/etc comments!
The old version worked perfectly for me even when I wasn’t logged in and wasn’t accepting cookies.
Also, with the old version, after I read a comment, it would stop appearing in the recent comments list. The new version continues to show comments I’ve already read.
At this point we haven’t found a simple solution.
Yes, our old Recent Comments plugin worked perfectly fine … until late March, when we started using the WP Super Cache plugin, which fixed other problems our site was having but created this new problem of the Recent Comments plugin not working properly.
After the Recent Comments plugin went haywire, we spent a few weeks trying to figure out how to fix it. This week we tried using a new plugin for Recent Comments, which is also failing us. So we’re kind of following Spy’s advice and taking a break for hugs before applying new monkey wrenches.
Hugs are nice, but I would also consider alcoholic beverages at this point.
Here I was blaming the firewall guys for dicking with the browser cookies. Wouldn’t be the first time they broke things on me. Could not get comments list to show I had read them, always appeared to be the same list no matter what I tried. It’s good to shake them up once in awhile though; makes them feel wanted.
You can use an RSS reader to follow all PDD comments.
I can haz ALL the commentz!!! PDD RSS Feeds
BadCat makes a great point. Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you can always go to PDD’s comment feed to see the ten most recent comments.
@BadCat! Thanks!! Sometimes I overlook / forget the most obvious things.