Blog Comments and Notifications changes / updates

In the process of rolling out some updates for the blog section.

At this time this update has causes some changes to the commenting system, and any previous “subscribe to comments” notifications. In the middle of this update I realized that we had lost all of the comment subscriptions / notifications settings! I know many of our users depend on the email notifications they would get when new comments were added to some of our popular pages, so I am trying to determine if we should revert back to our old code.

I have re-added to option for everyone to subscribe once again to receive notifications of new comments, and even updated the thing that makes it easier to un-subscribe from getting these messages. So the options are there (here) to re-enable that, but I was unable to (at least at this time) get that info transferred over to our new code base.

Another major change is how our commenting system will be looking for and flagging spam comments.

If you try to add a comment and it does not appear in here for others to see within like 12 hours or so, then please send me a message via the contact form and mention that you added a comment that may have gotten auto-flagged as spam for one reason or another. Our old spam blocking did sometimes move real / non-spam comments to a folder that never gets checked, this new comment checking could so the same, hopefully it will be less, but I’ve not tested it yet, it could do worse.

Most real comments get published here, some of them may get edited with a note “edited by admin to remove.. but generally almost all comments get published that are not spam.

Most of the time once someone has posted a comment that has been approved once, future comments will auto-appear on the public pages. Certain things could change that, like having several links in a comment, using a different computer / device.

Sometimes new users will make a comment and it will be held in the moderation system until I wake up and get back to the scsc dashboard to check things out and approve / reply to new comments, but generally that happens within 12 hours or less, sometimes in minutes if I am awake and at the keyboard.

I don’t see all the pending comments all the time however.

Sometimes our anti-spam systems go a little overboard and pull a comment out of my “waiting for approval comment area” and move them to another folder that has thousands of spammer comments. I almost never go looking into that folder, unless someone sends a message saying “I made a comment yesterday around 8pm eastern time and it’s never appeared.. then I might dig into the overflowing junk folder to try to sift through the nike knockoff ads, and sex enhancers to look for something that should not have been sent there.

Unfortunately our site gets lots and lots of spam comments, and they all pile up in the never-to-be-seen, soon-will-be-auto-deleted tab. So if you make a comment and it does not come out of the moderation que and show on the public area within 12 hours – contact me via the online form and let me know so I can dig into the flagged as fake folder.

Updates are great, updates suck…

I will be working to get our blog color scheme back to the darker look that we had before. Also need to check that our share buttons have the right info added, our widgets showcasing the videos are working, and what else needs to be added to this checklist.

As I get further into this “blog section re-code” – I am finding all kinds of little things that the restart is missing, colors, fonts, some graphics – settings for the comments… if you see something that is missing that was here before, please let me know. I am trying to recreate everything from scratch to make this section faster and more secure.