WordPress Bug on GenSoftReviews - Thu, 22 Dec 2011

I got feedback from Bob trying to add a review to GenSoftReviews. He said there was no place to add it.

I took a look, and sure enough, the Add Your Review link was there, but under it was no form to enter your name, review and stars. Very strange. I tried it on my copy of the site on my own machine, and it worked without problem. I compared the files on my machine to the server and they were the same.

So I checked through the WordPress code and found this PHP statement preventing the form from being displayed:

if (’open’ == $post->comment_status) :

I went into phpMyAdmin and sure enough, all the comment_status-es for every post were marked as ‘closed’. In addition, a setting got changed to “An administrator must always approve the comment” when I know I never had that set. Very strange. Almost like it was hacked.

So then I went and searched the web, and I indeed found complaints about a WordPress from about a year ago that was exactly this problem: Why is my comments closed in all posts - open in all pages…!?? It seems like a lot of people have been having this problem. And it seems that for some people it keeps happening over and over.

In my case, this is the first time in the 3 years of GenSoftReviews that this has happened. And I’ve got comments on this Blog and it’s never happened here.

I kept looking and no one had a reason for this. Lot’s of ideas - maybe a WordPress bug - but no resolution.

I’m not too concerned. I used a simple SQL statement to reset the value to allow the comments:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = ‘open’ WHERE comment_status = ‘closed’;

If this happens again, then next time I’ll just hack my WordPress code and remove the check that the comment_status is ‘open’. That will guarantee to fix it for ever.

Ah the joys of maintaining websites. - sigh -