A quick update on two issues that have been bugging our loyal readership for the last week or so.
Email notifications (following this site)
Some of those readers who receive notification of new posts to AVfM via email have had their subscriptions inadvertently rerouted to a pre-deployment site called mockup.avoiceformen.com. The problem was caused by another instance of the same issue that broke comment posting about a month ago. That test site no longer exists, and the test sites that have replaced it have been treated in a way that should prevent a recurrence of the problem.
In theory, the problem has been fixed, those who got incorrectly moved over to follow the test site should now be back set to follow the main site and, to the extent that we’re able to check, nobody is now following the test site. No further action need be taken by you, but if you’ve noticed that such emails have stopped arriving, you can check the state of your blog subscriptions at subscribe.wordpress.com.
Any problems, comment below and we’ll try to get to the bottom of the problem.
Comment editing
This is a real pain for everybody and we apologise that we still have not found a permanent solution.
For those who are interested in the technical explanation: the problem is that when you log in securely, your authentication token is only available in secured requests. Editing is something that normally requires administrative privileges, therefore the authentication token has to be available for it to work.
We’re in touch with the edit plugin’s author and, having identified the problem, we hope a fix will soon be forthcoming. In the meantime, there is a fairly simple work-around that at least will allow you to edit your comments as desired: reload the page over secure HTTP. Here’s how to do that.
- The first of these screen shots is what you will normally see when browsing AVfM.
- Click in the location bar and insert (or otherwise edit) https:// in front of the www.
- In Firefox, at least, this will probably bring up a URL from your history, most likely the page that you are currently on (ie, the non-secured version). Tap the left or right key to dismiss history.
- When you press Enter, the page will reload (showing https:// in the location bar). Find and edit your comment.
A shortcut for Firefox users: to quickly find stuff in a page, tap the / key (forward slash), and begin typing what you’re looking for (eg your name). Press Ctrl-G (PC, at least) to find the next instance of it.
Caveat: For reasons that I’ve not (yet) investigated, when reading the secured version of an article, the comment voting system appears not to work. Doing the reverse of the above will fix that.
Again, any problems with this, raise them in the comments section below.
