From various responses from visitors to TPV, it appears that the comments are now working again.
PG has a few working hypotheses for what caused the comments crash, but hasn’t come to a definite conclusion yet.
PG uses a well-regarded security plugin called Wordfence to keep bad actors away from TPV and help keep the site running properly. (PG has no idea why TPV would be on anyone’s list of sites to hack because it’s not an ecommerce site, but bots will be bots.)
TPV runs on WordPress, a commonly-used open-source blog software program. A couple of days ago, WordPress had an update which PG promptly installed as usual.
The people who know more about these things than PG does advise installing WordPress updates promptly after they’re released to take advantage of the latest fixes for the program, which often include improvements in security. WordPress provides access to beta versions of new releases to allow people who have more time and knowledge about WordPress than PG does to discover any kinks, problems, etc., prior to the general release of the updated program.
Apparently, the latest Wordpress release and Wordfence initially had relationship issues that resulted in problems for would-be commenters on TPV.
It appears that, with the help of suggestions from several regular visitors to TPV, that the problem is now resolved.
One of the emails PG received after announcing that commenting was back indicated that the commenter had been unable to access the comments function on TPV for some time.
Hearing that sort of thing bothers PG because, as he has said multiple times in the past, he regards the comments as the best part of TPV.
Wherefore,
If anyone has problems making comments in the future, please let PG know via the Contact link at the top of the blog. Usually, it’s a problem he can fix easily and he’s happy to do so.
I also couldn’t use the Contact form.
But I had PG’s email address stored, and I hope that went through.
It is infinitely better to be able to read again – no commenting was bad enough, but I couldn’t see the new posts!
If anyone has problems making comments in the future, please let PG know via the Contact link at the top of the blog.
I have to laugh, when I tried to use the “Contact” form no message was sent. It kept giving me an error message.
So there I was using the “Contact” form, but wasn’t allowed to contact. HA!
Same thing happened to me. Will try again now…
[a couple minutes later…]
YUP: did NOT work using the Contact form. Got a red alert panel saying: “We were unable to process your form, please try again.” PG take note.
A significant reason websites get hacked is because once compromised, they can be used to serve malicious payloads, or just questionable content. I used to investigate this sort of thing in a previous life, and it was not unusual to find viagra stores hosted on mom and pop websites, or subdomains of other respectable sites. These hostings are quiet – usually the compromised domain shows no sign of compromise as the hosting is from a subdomain or hidden set of sub pages. Sometimes malware is installed on the site and then when a general attack is unleashed the actual payload comes from the compromised site.
What they are doing in these cases is hijacking the good reputation of your site. Much web blocking is done on reputation. “Good” websites are allowed, “Bad” are blocked. If you can serve malicious content from a Good website without the website knowing, you are way ahead of the game.
As a result, if you are hacked in this manner it can be a disaster, because even though nothing particularly ‘bad’ happens to your site, your website reputation is destroyed and you are added to block lists everywhere. It can be holy heck to get yourself removed from these, and in the meantime your regular visitors face “infected with malware” block messages and hurriedly delete their bookmark to your site, never to return.
Testing… testing…
Logging in with a Google account is no longer a requirement to comment?
edit: looks like it’s now possible to comment without going through the googleborg.