WordPress Jetpack Comments — WTF?

WordPress’s Jetpack plugin is a nice collection of features for bloggers. I host my blog on a server I pay for instead of on the big WordPress.com cluster because I appreciate the extra flexibility, but by using Jetpack, I can also get some of the more powerful cluster-based features, like improved search and uptime monitoring. I have also apparently been making use of a feature called Jetpack Comments, which provides a more elegant comment interface and allows users to authenticate through WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter.

Not that I get a lot of comments. Windypundit doesn’t have the readership it used to have, and I never really had an active commenter community. Lately, in fact, it seems I hardly get any comments at all, which has been kind of disappointing. I assumed people just weren’t finding my posts interesting enough to engage with.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve been writing about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and traffic to my site has roughly doubled because of it. And still there were no comments, even though this was a highly controversial subject. That was suspicious. Could there be something wrong with comments on my blog? Would that explain why I haven’t received any comments in a while?

Yes, yes it would.

It turns out Jetpack comments work by replacing the entire comment entry section with something called an iframe, which is an HTML element for embedding a web page inside another web page, and so the comment form displayed at the bottom of my posts wasn’t generated by code running on my server, it was fetched from WordPress.com. And when the user types in a comment and submits it, the form is sent back to WordPress.com. I assume it’s then authenticated appropriately and submitted back to my server and displayed.

At least that was the theory. But when I launched an incognito browser window and used it to submit a test comment, for some reason the iframe filled with a cropped-down duplicate copy of the Windypundit web page, complete with animated banner, but all trapped in a box where the comments used to be. I don’t know where the comment went, but it never made it to my blog’s database.

So…maybe the lack of comments wasn’t due to my being boring after all. I wonder how long it’s been that way…

I assumed that problem was either that my theme design was missing some crucial element that makes Jetpack comments work, or that some other plugin was interfering with Jetpack, so I switched to the WordPress-provided Twenty Fourteen theme and I disabled every plugin except Jetpack. Essentially, I was running WordPress fresh out of the box. And still the problem didn’t go away. I don’t know, maybe it’s some weird Cloudflare thing.

I finally gave up. I put everything back the way it was and then disabled Jetpack comments, which seems to have fixed the problem.

I still wanted the social media connection, so I installed the Social Login plugin, which provides alternate authentication through lots of different social networks using the rather amazing protocol translation services provided by oneall. I almost immediately started getting spam comments, so I also dropped in the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, which supposedly checks for humanity by requiring you to check a box. I’m not sure why that can’t be automated, but I’ll give it a try.

I need to test this, so if you’ve read this far, please help me out by leaving a comment. Just say hi. Let me know that my blog software is no longer turning readers away.