Disappearing comments

Hi there, @hendrix924,

Thanks for explaining in details your issue and for running some troubleshooting tests already. As I inspected yoru site, my first guess would be a plugin conflict or a theme conflict, however you seemed to have covered that and didn’t find anything.

I also read that old GH issue, and it’s possible that there might be some HTTPS related hiccups that might affect the comments feature. Your SSL certificate looks okay on my end, I wonder if you can reach out to your shot and ensure everything is okay at their end as far as this problem is concerned?

If the plugin and theme checks are 100% covered and the host confirms all is good at their end, we’ll keep investigating. Let me know what you find out first, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks for working this out with us!

Hi @erania-pinnera, thanks very much for taking the time to look into this, and sorry for my slow reply. I did contact my host (Dreamhost), and they said everything looks fine from their end. Here’s their response:

“After careful investigation, I found that the SSL certificate looks good:

“Details for: andrewblackman.net Let’s Encrypt certificate was found and is being used.
Expires: 2024-11-17 10:24:23

“However, I did notice that many URLs in the database are http, I ran a search replace to force all http to https to see if this helps: Success: Made 11436 replacements. So seems there were 11436 URLs resolving to http instead of https.”

I checked the site after they did this, and it made no difference. Comments still work fine with the default WordPress comments, but as soon as I switch on Jetpack comments, I get the same issue with the page getting stuck on “Submitting Comment”.

I appreciate that this is a tricky one to resolve, but please let me know if you can think of anything else I can try. Thanks again!

Hi @hendrix924,

Thank you for providing the details.

I noticed that you currently have the Better Recent Comments plugin installed, and it looks like the Jetpack Comments feature is now disabled. Could you confirm if you deactivated Jetpack Comments and installed this plugin afterward? This might help us pinpoint whether the issue is related to the recent changes.

Since the issue persists, it might also be worth checking if any JavaScript errors are occurring when a comment is submitted. You can do this by opening your browser’s developer tools (usually by pressing F12 or by right-clicking and selecting Inspect). From there, navigate to the Console tab and try submitting a comment again to see if any errors appear. If any errors are displayed, please share them with us, as they could provide more insight into the issue.

Let me know what you find, and we’ll go from there!

Hi there @hendrix924,

Do you have updates about that, do you still need help? We usually close inactive threads after one week of no movement, but we want to make sure we’re all set before marking it as solved. Thanks!

Hi @erania-pinnera Thanks for following up on this. Sorry, it’s still not resolved – I spent a lot of time with Dreamhost customer support and things got very complicated, so I just felt like giving up. But since you kindly followed up on this, here’s an update.

Dreamhost support tried a bunch of things and concluded that the issue was to do with the security headers:

“During the tests, I got the following message from the Google Chrome’s developer console: An iframe which has both allow-scripts and allow-same-origin for its sandbox attribute can escape its sandboxing. From the details of the message above, it appears to be related to the security headers of the site. I tried editing its security headers, and I was able to get the comment to show up after adding the following to its Content-Security-Policy header: sandbox allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms”

This did get the comments to appear, but now I have a bunch of weird formatting errors. When I’m logged in and leave a comment, I see this:

When I’m logged out and leave a comment anonymously, I see this:

Also, when I’m logged out, the WordPress and Facebook login buttons don’t work. When I click on the WordPress icon, I see this in the console:

When I first open a post and inspect the comment form using Firefox developer tools, I see this in the console:

I deactivated Jetpack comments because I don’t want visitors to have any more problems, but if you need me to reactivate it so that you can test things, I can do so. If you have ideas on what could be causing the issues, please let me know.

@alinclamba thanks for your comment too, and sorry for my delayed response. I have had the Better Recent Comments plugin installed for years, and it always worked fine with Jetpack until a few months ago. As I said in my original post, the Jetpack problems continued even when I deactivated all plugins and switched to the default WP theme, so I don’t think it’s a plugin conflict.

Thanks to both of you for following up and trying to help with this – much appreciated ??

Hi @hendrix924, thanks for the additional details and feedback. Our team is looking more into this, we’ll update you once we have an update.

Hi @hendrix924 –

Thanks for your patience here. Our team is still investigating this issue.

Hi there, @hendrix924,

Just a quick update to let you know that our tech team is making progress, and are testing a fix that might be working to solve your issue. We’re still in the process of testing the fix, but we might have good news to share soon ??