It’s recently come to my attention that Mozilla Firefox may be screwing with the comments on this weblog. For a number of people, myself included, Firefox shows the correct count but none of the comments. Attempting to post a comment with Firefox somehow manages to split the comment thread in two. The comments posted in Firefox only show up in Firefox, whereas the comments posted in Internet Explorer (which I’ll just assume is everyone else’s default browser) only show up in Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, the count starts referring to the Firefox comments, while ignoring the old and new comments made in IE.
What this means, basically, is this: a weblog post (like this one) will have x number of comments. A reader using Firefox will see that number in the comment count, but when he or she opens the thread, it will appear to be empty. When the reader posts a comment of his or her own, the comment count will switch to 1 (and so on, as he or she posts more comments). The reader still won’t be able to see the earlier comments, and readers using Internet Explorer won’t be able to see Firefox comments. The only thing they’ll both see is an erroneous comment count — but Firefox users are the only ones for whom that count will actually seem to add up.
Or, you know, maybe it’s not Firefox. It’s happened a handful of other times to different people here, but maybe Mozilla isn’t the link that’s shared between them. I honestly haven’t got a clue why this is happening. Some of you may be using Firefox with no problem, seeing all the comments with the counts always matching up with what you see on screen. If you’re noticing discrepancies, however — or if it just seems like nobody ever comments here — please let me know.
And, in the meantime, if you do open a comment thread to find its count doesn’t match what you see on screen, could you possibly try viewing the page in a different browser and see if that helps? I’d really like to figure out a solution and ensure that everyone’s voice gets heard.