dekay.org

Thanks goes out to Todd who notified me of my broken comment system. At first I thought “that can’t be, I tested it and it worked” - then I realized most comments from last night, including Todd’s were held in the moderation queue. I suppose SpamKarma was set to a too strict setting. Now what happened when I wanted to answer some comments at the post “Tags in Itunes, Anyone?” was quite unexpected: I received the following message:

“Sorry, you can only post a new comment once every 15 seconds. Slow down cowboy.”

Hey, someone must have had a bug like this before, right?

Now there is nothing wrong with a good check against comment flooders - but I had not done anything like that. Oh well, I checked the WordPress Support Forum and found an answer here suggesting that a wrong date in one of the comments was causing the problem - being in the future - and thus thinking that a difference of a negative time between posts was bad. In fact this error did not happen here.

What on earth could then be wrong?

I googled the error message a bit and finally ended here, basically at a changelog of the WordPress function that checked against comment flooders. So what basically happened was that every comment posted by a previous commenter (same IP) was being trapped inside this function - just because some missing brackets ;( So it was quite obvious why not all posters had seen this before - just those who commented a second time.

Now what?

I fixed the code once and for all - until the next feature of a nightly build comes up. Until then: I suppose I will update to the current nightly build to make things more interesting!