Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Commenting problems?
A cyberstalking friend of mine told me today that he had been leaving comments, but wasn't seeing them
“Are you just deleting them?” he asked.
No, I didn't know about them.
Not sure what the problem is really. Spent some time debugging. I did learn that something about my template, or something about blojsom, might actually be at fault. From a user prespective I could report missing required fields I suppose, but I don't see built in facilities for that (double checking though). Yet I have received and approved recent comments, so I know that commenting works.
Could it be that my friend was not entering the SCode? In production, I turn down the logging, way down, only ERROR and FATAL. SCode only has a DEBUG level, and that is very noisy, so I didn't see anything in production. All said, something is happening. Just not sure yet.
Sad too. Some of the comments he reported were worthy of “immortalization” on ACD.
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A couple of things I noticed were that the "Remember me?" function doesn't remember me and when I leave a comment I don't get any message telling me it worked.
Apparently, there is no default for this in blojsom, or read: if you don't set the property for comment cookie expiration, it is read as "zero" (in seconds!).
Setting this to a "normal" default like, 60 days, is 5,184,000 seconds! Not sure this was most thought out property value in blojsom. Will be shortly committing a patch me thinks (though blojsom 2.x patches are not getting much attention, they tend to be ported to the 3.x code base). I set the property, and in fact am testing it.
As to user feedback, this is left to the template developer I think. Errors are not handled well in Velocity. Velocity is simple, and perfectly serviceable, Java templating language, but it lacks things like Struts or Stripes for returning errors on submit. Or I don't know what that is, yet. Posting success is also an exercise for the template developer I believe (seem to recall blojsom 1.x templates having this feature).
Thanks for the feedback!
See... commenting works.