Commenting on Ye Olde Blogge – A Public Service Announcement

Around the time of April’s A to Z blogging challenge, I learned that a subset of the few people that actually read my blog – the commenters – couldn’t. I started having replying troubles around the same time. If you go back to my posts during that challenge, you can see all my little updates and PSAs as I worked through the problem. Spoiler: Unsuccessfully.

If I replied to someone from within ye olde blogge –  through the WordPress dashboard – no problem. If I tried to reply directly from the page, I usually got the WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH. And my oh-so-carefully crafted and witty response had gone into the ether like mist on a July morning, just like it did for my commenters. GRRRRRRRRRR.

So I tried researching this problem through the good ol’ Interweb and came up with squat. Then I called Bluehost and Mr. Bluehost had no problem commenting on ye olde blogge no matter what web browser was employed. But of course you did. So no solutions found there.

This problem was so bad I wasn’t even getting spam anymore, and I complained about it to Mr. Bluehost and I think this gave him the laugh of his day if not his week.

I tried everything I could think of. I changed themes. I installed plugins. I removed plugins. I swore. I drank. I shook my tiny fist of rage at the screen. Then I begged its forgiveness. I burned incense and meditated on the problem. I laid offerings in front of the iMac. Nothing worked.

Fast forward to now – I AM back to getting spam again. Hoorah, I think?

So I thought the problem was fixed. But some other bloggers have been telling me it is still there.

So I reached out to Joanne of My Live Lived Full, who seems to have found a work-around. This is what she does, to successfully comment without triggering the WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH:

What I have learned is:
1) if I see that my info has not auto filled in the comment section (i.e. my blog name, email address etc), I know that my comment will not post and I’ll get the white screen.  If I manually enter the data, the comment will not post.
 2) my work around is that I will return to your home page and then reopen the post from your home page.  It seems that every time I do that, my data will then auto fill and I can comment without issue.
I am sorry, dear Readers/Potential Commenters of Ye Olde Blogge, that I don’t have anything more to offer than this. And thank you Joanne, for sharing the secret to your commenting success.
I am contemplating moving to a paid theme at some point, in hopes problems like these will be non-existent, or at least fixable. And then I can access some support when these things arise, amiright?
Who uses a paid theme? I’d love to discuss this with you. Please leave me a comment shoot me an email.
Rock on,
The WB
P.S. And now I can’t seem to get the paragraph spacing to work after I inserted Joanne’s workaround notes so the bottom part of my post is all scrunched together. Fuck it, I gotta go to work. Sorry.