Category: Website Changes

My apologies to those that have tried to access the sortable spreadsheet. After a security incident a week ago I had to go to my back up copy of the sortable sheet and in the process did not get the setting right—i.e. folks didn’t have easy access.

I hopefully have fixed the setting and those that follow the instructions here should now have easy access once again.

Many have noticed that once a comment is made the comment takes too long to post – just spins for 5-30 seconds before posting. Some time ago in an effort to ‘retain history’ I set things up so that comments would never be eliminated–some folks like to look back for comments. I am guessing that we are maxing out the ability of WordPress to process so much history. Some of the most popular pages (i.e. sandbox) have over 15 months of history and 1000’s of comments. I will need to trim this hisory somewhat–how much I am not certain, but to the point where the site speeds up.

We’ve had a couple folks note that the reCaptha security can sometimes be difficult for them.

I want to make everything as easy as possible for folks, but I have to try balancing easiness with the need to keep the ‘bots’ off our site. So far (in 6 years) I have been quite amazed to find very little bot action getting through–and believe me they are trying every hour of every day–I have the stats and they are crazy numbers hitting the site daily.

I have made a tweak to the security and we will see where we go from here. I will observe the spam and bots and see if it increases–if I see a bunch of bots getting through then I will have to re-tweak, but if not we will leave it with new settings. I do not want to be specific with the changes I have made (or will make) because I don’t want to attract spammers.

There have been some comments about the ‘Reply Link’ disappearing in the comments sections.

My research has found that the current website setup allows for only 10 comments in reply to an initial comment before the ‘reply’ link disappears. I don’t remember this being an issue before–or maybe it was and I missed it.

Regardless the setting only allows 10 at a max–this can be changed but it will require a bit of coding to fix–and while there is a chance I could do it myself I will get it on the list for a ‘pro’ to do. I don’t want a 69 year old doofus (me) messing with the website code.

So for the moment please bear with me until we can get it adjusted.

In the past folks have had to wait way too long for the comments page to load because we had so many comments on some pages – i.e. Sandbox and Reader Alerts.

Finally I figured out how to make this change and now I have it set up to load a limited number of comments on page 1. If one wants to see older comments you will have to click ‘older comments’. I currently have it set for 50 per page (versus over 1000 before)–but I can tweak to 75 or 100 if that looks advantageous. The key is to get the page loaded quickly so you don’t have to wait–but yet maintaining the history of comments.