Comments Closed on All Posts Over 6 Days Old on TWO blogs

It hasn’t hit me in a while, but when it does it’s a terrible pain. Hope someone resolves it since none of the higher powers have noticed. :/

Count me among those having this same problem. Upgrade to 3.1 didn’t help, deactivating all plugins didn’t help. Interstingly, I notice a few others who use have iPower as a server. Could this be a server problem perhaps? Wish WordPress would acknowledge this problem. In the meantime, I’ll try the plugin mentioned above.

Thanks for the extended comment plugin recommendation. At least it keeps me from having to spend hours re-opening all the posts manually.

We switched to a new server just recently (from iPower, which we hated for many reasons and were relieved to switch from their shared and VPS hosting to a new much better host) and will have to see if we encounter this problem again with our new setup.

@abigailblake – We’re using dedicated, on-site hosting, nginx + php-fpm + PHP APC + WP Super Cache on a decent traffic site (we used to be an ISP). We control the servers and I’m very comfortable with PHP and WP plugin authoring. If the person who reported the initial issue to me can replicate it again in our environment, I’ll be looking into it. If I can figure out the issue, it’ll get reported to Trac as a bug with the requisite patch against the WP core.

So this bug has been cropping up periodically at The Alexandrian (https://www.thealexandrian.net) and I think I may have noticed something which might help track it down:

I have been slowly converting posts from my old blog over to my new WordPress installation. Whenever I have some spare time, I’ll go through and convert another batch of posts.

And it’s either during or shortly after I do one of these conversion sessions that my comments close down. Which suggests it either

(a) has something to do with the text I’m copying and pasting from my old site

(b) something about back-dating posts is triggering the problem. Not every single time, but regularly enough to trigger the problem

(c) something to do with posting many posts within a relatively short span of time

Thinking about this some more overnight, couple other possibilities to experiment with: I’ve also been copying over comments from the old site.

Example post: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/5872/roleplaying-games/you-cant-do-that-here

And the original comments that I’m copying and pasting into the WordPress comment system.

Some of these conglomerated comments can get very large. So it might be the size; it might be some sort of HTML or CSS code that’s getting transferred in the copy-paste; it might be posting comments on very old posts; it might be posting comments to a post while it’s open in preview mode or edit mode in another tab (maybe if WordPress is triggering an auto-save of a post open for editing while I’m commenting on it? I don’t know); or it might be some combination of those.

Haven’t encountered this blog in months. Just got back from vacation and realized two of my blogs were closed off again.

Freak. Someone acknowledge this problem!

Yes, this has just happened to my blog for the second time. I hadn’t done anything with the blog for ages (last post 25th Feb) and yesterday I did the following:
– upgraded some plugins
– backed up database
– upgraded to 3.1.2 from 3.1.1
– optimized database
– backed up database again

I was fairly sure it was caused by the upgrade but, like last time, my Akismet stats are a better indication of when it happened since it drops to zero and now I’m not so sure. My Akismet stats indicate that it must have happened at the start of May but I was away and, as I’ve previously said, I’ve not done a new post since Feb.

As detailed in this post on a similar thread, I used the following SQL command on my database:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = REPLACE (comment_status, 'closed', 'open') WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post';

and that has switched comments on for all my published posts and appears to have fixed it… until the next time. I must note that ‘Allow pings’ was ok and checked for all published posts.

I just watched it happen in real time: I was commenting on my own blog. When I hit the post button I got an Internal Server Error:

Sorry, comments are closed for this item.
Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, **** and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

A few things were true at this moment:

1. I had the post open in a separate Firefox tab and had just saved some changes to it (in order to correct typographical errors).

2. I may have been hitting post simultaneously with another commenter.

The post in question is: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games

Comment #3 on this post is the one which may have been posted simultaneously. If not, it was the last comment made on the site before the comments shut down (and would have been made either simultaneously with that shut down or within mere moments or minutes of the shut down).