Um, in with the old, out with the new, I guess. With the help of Gerson and some poking around online, I’ve figured out why the comments sometimes seem to go all wonky in different browsers. Essentially, Blogger used to use an 8-digit ID number for each post, which was fine. Then they switched to an 18-digit number, which is a little too long for javascript and which, therefore, often throws the whole thing for a loop. That’s why you’d have different browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer rounding the numbers differently and sometimes giving you pop-ups without comments when there obviously should have been some.

I’ve attempted to implement a fix in order to prevent it from happening too often again, but the fix leaves a number of earlier links (including some as recent as yesterday) broken and showing no comments. To really fix things, I’ll apparently have to go through the source files for all my archived posts and match numbers there with numbers in my cgi-bin directory. Which, at the moment, I’m not really prepared to do. (Espcially since even that is apparently not a perfect fix and still allows for comment errors.)

So you may again notice that some comments are missing and some counts are wrong. This time, however, I hope that’s what everyone’s seeing. While it may leave a lot of broken links and missing comments in its wake, I’m hoping this fix will at least prevent the same problems from happening with posts from this point on.

Fingers crossed. We’ll see.

Tomorrow is my last day at work, so I’ve been taking some time to delete the last few vestiges of me-ness from the office. Or rather, to delete or copy the personal files and whatnot I want to take with me or just don’t want my replacement to have. It’s surprising how these things accumulate after almost three years.

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.