folo

Recently Researcher, duckweedpond, and it seems like a few others have mentioned having no Edit button available. I think I know why that’s happened in their two cases, but I’m not sure who else may be having the problem. If you too have noticed the Edit button missing from your Comment box, please say so on this thread.

We bet Researcher and ducky’s glitch derives from the same problem that sent them to join a few other regulars in the spam-filter recently: Seems that whenever Akismet, the company that supplies our filter, updates its anti-spam algorithms, WordPress blogs using their service can suffer a short spate of both “false positives” (innocent comments arrested as spam) and “false negatives” (real spammers ignored by the filter). And indeed, we’ve observed both effects here over the last couple of weeks.

Well, a side-effect seems to be this Edit-button problem. As riddenword explained it to me, the software that allows comment-editing must be able to recognize who the author is within one hour of the comment’s submission. But when the dang spam-filter grabbed these innocent comments, apparently either it changed the hidden code identifying the authors, or more than an hour passed before the comments got released (or both). Therefore (injury on top of insult!) the Edit-button software also got fooled into hiding from these folks.

A thousand pardons to y’all so afflicted, but I want to make sure I know who all that includes. If you’ve had either spam-filter or Edit-button trouble lately — and you’re NOT Researcher, ducky, DeltaNative, mag, Stormy, Jane, or NMC — please let me know either on this thread (if you can) or by email (if you can’t). Possibly I failed to spot a snagged regular or two before cleaning out the spam filter, in which case they won’t be able to comment now. If that happened to you, please let me know so we can fix it (um, sorry, brewski, this doesn’t apply to you).

Those of you who did some uncalled-for time in spam-jail, is your Edit function back now, as we expect? Please advise . . .

Thanks.