hamlet9000

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).

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.

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

Ping.

Happened again. At this point I wish there was a way I could reverse time and go back to the old version of WordPress that didn’t periodically sabotage my website.

This has been happening about once a week at https://www.thealexandrian.net. And it only started happening when I upgraded WordPress to the latest version.

It’s clearly a problem with WordPress.