Journal de Jacques

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Today (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.

Update: Ahem. The move will take longer than anticipated — it will probably happen Sunday instead.

Update 2: To prevent people being from being upset by their bon mots going missing, I’ve temporarily suspended commenting while the posts and comments are moved to the new server.

Update 3: Failure. Attempt 1 used the native Wordpress WXR export/import toolset, which didn’t work. Attempt 2 (today) broke the export/import down per author, which didn’t work. Most annoyingly it strips out <embed> tags of the sort used for YouTube videos.

It looks like I will need to do it “the hard way”, which involves dumping and loading databases after passing them through some data-munging gymnastics. So it looks like troppo will be staying where it is for another week.

I’ve re-enabled comments.

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

Feel free to express your hatred, dread etc etc below.

Update: Just to add insult to injury, our server internet connection failed for about an hour.

Good old Spam Karma 2 has been trundled off to the glue factory. Ever since its maintainer threw in the towel because of the vague vagaries of Wordpress, SK2 has been living on borrowed time.

A few days ago the ever observant James A, sometime commenter here at Troppo, remarked that comment subscriptions seemed to be broken. It took us a while to suss out why.

One thing the comment-subscription plugin does, when deciding to send a comment by email, is to check whether that comment is approved and not spam. For whatever reason, SK2 was now reporting all new comments as spam, which meant they were ignored by the emailer.

I’m not sure why this is happening. SK2 hasn’t changed so the culprit is probably internal changes to Wordpress since 2.6. The Wordpress team do delight in changing the semantics of internal plumbing that plugins and themes rely on, then go on to enchant all comers by closing bug reports on their site with remarks about how it didn’t affect them so obviously it doesn’t affect anyone else.

In any case, with the maintenance of Spam Karma 2 falling behind Wordpress, it’s time to send the old warhorse to the knackers.

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Our hosts, the University Computer Club, have advised that there will be some downtime today between 11am and 12.15pm WA Standard Time. I hope you can all nurse yourselves through your Troppo withdrawals for this brief interlude.

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