Over the last several weeks, a lot of you have, understandably, complained about issues with commenting on the “Mad Men” posts – specifically, with some comments appearing to disappear and others being duplicated. I’ve insisted repeatedly that our web designers were working on this, and it looks like we’ve finally licked the problem.
Without boring you with the technical details, it looks like the problem wasn’t that comments were disappearing, but that once the number of comments passed a certain point (“Mad Men” posts get more comments than anything else on the site, by far), two things began to happen: 1)Comments began to appear out of chronological order, and 2)Some comments began duplicating themselves, further mucking up the order. As far as we’ve been able to figure so far, no comments were lost; they just weren’t where anyone was looking for them, and the duplicates only complicated any attempt to look.
Both of those issues have been resolved, and I skimmed the comments on the most recent post, where it now looks like everything’s in the proper order.
That said, I want to be sure we’ve actually licked the problem. It’s entirely possible that comments have disappeared, and in such a way that they don’t even appear under the hood where the programmers and I can see. So if it looked earlier in the week like one of your comments vanished and you remember roughly when you posted it, would you mind taking a look to see if you can find it? If everything is where it was supposed to be, then the fix has taken. (And we’ll remain diligent in case it pops up again.) But if comments are still missing, then our people will keep digging deeper.
I understand that this is frustrating. We’re doing what we can, when we can.