On Comment Count Being Wrong

Many of you have noticed that sometimes the comment count can be off. For instance, on either the main page or in single post it might say “5” but there might be one or none. It’s been a bane for me for years. The count is including all those comments in the spam cue. I’ve tried this and that and something else many times to fix it, but, no dice.

I was trying again this morning, and gave up after starting a help post at the WordPress.org forums. Since I was doing admin stuff, I decided to deactivate the threaded comments plugins and activate the WP included capability. Interestingly, when I deactivated one, Yet Another Threaded Comments Plugin, the issue immediately stopped. So the counts should show correctly now.

Unfortunately, threaded comments doesn’t seem to work. Maybe if I leave it active and update to WP 3.7.1, but, eh, no one really used them in the first place except me now and then. However, I did leave Brian’s Threaded Comments active. It’s easier than adding a bunch of code to the original code for the comments (dot) php file that came with the Violator theme. Said code controls showing the trackbacks/pingbacks separately right before the comments on a single post page.

The BTC plugin no longer actually works for threaded comments, creator stopped updating it years ago, and I think it was the WP update to 3.0 that caused it to no longer thread. Hence the use of the “Yet Another” plugin.

Furthermore, without BTC the Gigya plugin wouldn’t work correctly. Those are the buttons above the comments which allow you to login to post using various methods like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Can make commenting easier in terms of not having to re-enter info (though you should be able to double click in a box like “name” to bring up your info).

Anyhow, if anyone sees anything funky, let me know. Seems fine in Firefox and Opera for me, both logged in and logged out.

Interestingly, the page also seems to be loading just a bit faster with that plugin turned off.

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5 Responses to “On Comment Count Being Wrong”

  1. proof says:

    I’d always thought you hired a liberal to count your comments for you. We all know they think that ‘math is hard’.

  2. I thought about hiring Obama’s HHS folks, at least the count would be non-functional, or something like 3.43577Hope!

  3. proof says:

    Thinking outside the box…i like it! Maybe you could get some of his Fast and Furious people to lose track of comments for you?

  4. Dana says:

    I’m using WordPress 3.6.1 and using the straight-up WordPress commenting feature, with the Akismet spam catcher, and it works almost perfectly for me. I used to use the threaded comments feature, but once the comments exceeded twenty or so — and yeah, I get a lot, and used to get even more before I had to ban someone — it got too confusing for readers to follow.

    I use Mozilla Firefox at work, and Google Chrome at home, and it works fine for me.

    My settings don’t bring up the second window for comments when you click on the comments button, but opens the article up directly; that’s something I definitely prefer.

    And, as long as we’re on the subject, you have the site set to variable width display (I can tell, because it adjusts for my wider screen at home and narrower one at work), but you should increase your maximum width setting; on my monitor at home, I’m getting about 1½ inches of grey on each side.

  5. I thought I had upgrade, guess I’m actually on 3.4.1. I’ll wait till me next day off to upgrade. I will upgrade my backup site, just to make sure things don’t go boom.

    Not sure why it doesn’t open in a comments window. Strange.

    As for the total width, the theme is optimized for a certain size, due to background graphics. I get a tiny bit of gray on the side of my screen. Like it better than fixed width, though.

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