Steven Chamberlain's dashboard

Steven Chamberlain marked one of Michael Koenig's replies in IntenseDebate as useful. Michael Koenig replied to the question "Cant access Intense Debate, latest wordpress plugin keeps wordpress blog from loading at android-unleashed.com".

Steven Chamberlain replied on June 18, 2009 19:09 to the question "Cant access Intense Debate, latest wordpress plugin keeps wordpress blog from loading at android-unleashed.com" in IntenseDebate:

I notice things in my server logs which could be explained if there were outages of IntenseDebate. 2009/06/18 17:06:28 to 17:20:14 UTC, and 18:42:55 to 18:46:04 UTC.

Steven Chamberlain started following the question "Cant access Intense Debate, latest wordpress plugin keeps wordpress blog from loading at android-unleashed.com" in IntenseDebate.

Steven Chamberlain replied on May 19, 2009 23:04 to the problem "'Notify of replies' doesn't work as I'd expect" in IntenseDebate:

I can give an example of this which will hopefully help.

I posted this comment, whilst logged in as username 'steven98235' and ticked the 'notify of replies' box before clicking the 'Post reply' button:
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/bnp-euro-el...

I received no notification of the reply by user 'HJ11'. But I did receive email notifications when that site's IntenseDebate moderators posted comments elsewhere on that blog post's comments (which were not directly in reply to mine) :

'Ed(B)', user ID '299280', a moderator:
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/bnp-euro-el...

'Simon Bennett', user ID '286791', also a moderator:
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/bnp-euro-el...
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/bnp-euro-el...
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/bnp-euro-el...

Those are the only four comments I received email notifications of.

This is how it's behaved since I first used IntenseDebate, and at least one other user of the same site reported the same issue.

I'm pretty sure it isn't just a problem receiving the email notifications. I run my own email servers here and the logs on both my MXes show those 4 notifications being received (with SPF 'passes' and valid DKIM signatures). But no other email came in at all from 72.233.*.* or *.*.intensedebate.com during that period, so it's not being spam-filtered here. I use Mozilla Thunderbird to read my email and it's own built-in junk email filter is disabled.

Steven Chamberlain reported a problem in IntenseDebate on May 17, 2009 13:13:

'Notify of replies' doesn't work as I'd expect

Could someone please explain the intended behaviour of the 'notify me of replies' box.

Whether posting 'anonymously' or from an IntenseDebate account, ticking this box does not seem to notify me of direct replies by other users to comments I have left.

But when a blog admin leaves a comment on the same comments page (whether in reply to my comment or not), I receive notifications of that. I would not expect that to happen.

I would expect that ticking the box would trigger replies when anyone replies directly to my comment with the 'post reply' button (and perhaps also when a reply is left on one of those replies, etc., within the same 'thread').

I would not expect to receive notifications of posts by blog admins on the same comments page, that were not within my own comment thread.

Steven Chamberlain asked a question in IntenseDebate on May 14, 2009 16:37:

4294967295 replies

I've yet to see 0xFFFFFFFF replies on a comment, so I'd call this a bug.

http://bnp.org.uk/2009/05/see-the-bnp...

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 18, 2009 15:36 to the problem "Persistent login problems" in IntenseDebate:

In reply to the original comment, it appears that Firefox users who disabled the 'Accept third-party cookies' in Options>Privacy will have the exact problem you described.

Because the IntenseDebate comments area loads from their servers, their website is considered third-party and would be unable to store a login cookie if you disabled third-party cookies in your browser. (Although when visiting intensedebate.com directly, you may stay logged in.)

If you are worried about the privacy implications of enabling third-party cookies, consider the AdBlock Plus add-on for Firefox which will effectively prevent advertising companies from storing tracking cookies, whilst allowing IntenseDebate to function correctly.

As a side-note, if it becomes possible to link IntenseDebate accounts with Wordpress blog accounts (such that blog visitors are automatically logged into their IntenseDebate accounts) this issue would probably be avoided.

A comment on the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate:

Oh, and not to mention there might be a way to do it without requiring JavaScript. – Steven Chamberlain, on April 18, 2009 02:29

A comment on the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate:

The million-dollar question. This has been my biggest reservation about IntenseDebate I first heard about it. I don't understand their business model, so I'm not sure if they want to use their comments platform to track activity of users across websites (which they maybe couldn't do if we hosted the comments ourselves). Perhaps not; maybe it was purely a design/technical decision for them to host the actual comments. Even if the availability issues are resolved, it's still a flawed approach. (Having people enter their IntenseDebate login credentials on third party sites? How long is that really going to seem at all secure?) – Steven Chamberlain, on April 18, 2009 02:26

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 18, 2009 02:07 to the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate:

Can confirm normal service has resumed.

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 18, 2009 01:25 to the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate:

1 hour 15 minutes and counting... we're already below 99.9% uptime now.

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 18, 2009 00:29 to the question "Can we get something other than "Mystery Man" as the Default Avatar?" in IntenseDebate:

Like cake?

Steven Chamberlain started following the question "Is there a way to host intensedebate comments locally, on own server?" in IntenseDebate.

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 18, 2009 00:15 to the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate:

Happening again now (2009-04-18 00:10 UTC).
www.intensedebate.com gives up loading after about 2 minutes with a 504 Gateway Time-out from the nginx reverse proxy.

A knock-on effect on sites using IntenseDebate for their comments, is that visitors' browsers (Firefox/IE8 at least) will hang on the < script> tags referring to external scripts hosted by IntenseDebate. That prevents the rest of the page (eg. sidebar/footer) from loading, and obviously the comments do not load either. On a busy site it could cause a build-up of traffic with lots of people refreshing pages, maybe enough to take a site down if you're on running on the edge of your available resources.

Steven Chamberlain started following the problem "Is intensedebate down?" in IntenseDebate.

A comment on the problem "2009-03-23 -- did everyone's Wordpress blog just slow down / crash due to ID?" in IntenseDebate:

Wordpress seems massively inefficient on its memory usage, and can use a lot of RAM for each connection to Apache webserver. Apache limits the maximum number of concurrent connections, but it's also limited by the server's available memory (either going into swapspace and suffering a massive performance drop, or running out of memory and failing entirely). The RAM usage spike and server issues could just come from momentary increase in the number of visitors (eg. Slashdot/Digg effect). But if a plugin stalls, waiting for something to happen (as the IntenseDebate plugin seems to have done in the past when there have been outages), there can be a backlog of people trying to connect, which can quickly escalate (like a 'snowploughing' effect) until either Apache's concurrent connection limit is reached or the server's memory exhausted.

It's probably not easy to tell where/why any hold-up occurred, but I've been looking into the PHP 'xdebug' extension and its 'auto_trace' function that logs the time spent in each PHP file/function for every HTTP request. That wouldn't be so easy to use on a busy production server though. – Steven Chamberlain, on April 06, 2009 18:26

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 04, 2009 03:51 to the problem "User reports being unable to log in" in IntenseDebate:

Thank you very much, that seems to have worked.

I'm very confused as to what could have been wrong. Some ideas I have are that the 'forgot password' emails include a full stop immediately after the new password, so he may have copy+pasted that inadvertently; perhaps copy+pasted the space before the password, although I suspect you will trim any spaces given before/after the password; or, perhaps he was trying to manually type the new password but mistaking similar characters in his mail reader's font (uppercase I, lowercase l, numeral 1; uppercase O, numeral 0; even B/8, Z/2). Or even a problem in the password reset code, who knows.

Anyway, thanks again!

Steven Chamberlain marked one of Michael Koenig's replies in IntenseDebate as useful. Michael Koenig replied to the problem "User reports being unable to log in".

Steven Chamberlain started following the problem "Password Reset Problem" in IntenseDebate.

Steven Chamberlain replied on April 03, 2009 17:50 to the question "Supplying a default OpenID username for users" in IntenseDebate:

Or this! Should automatically log a user in using an OpenID if they're not logged in already.


<head>
...
< script type="text/javascript">
function log_user_in()
{
if (!commentObj.curUser.isLoggedIn)
{
var list = document.getElementsByTagName('input');
for (i=0; i < list.length; i++)
{
var item = list[i];
if (item.name == 'openid' && item.value == 'http://')
{
item.value = 'http://www.example.com/openid';
}
}

document.getElementById('frmHeadLoginOpenID').submit();
}
}

</head>

<body>
...
</body>

I'd certainly like IntenseDebate to support automatic OpenID login as a feature someday, instead of needing a hack like this!