Expressionengine Comment Form And Entries Dissapear on some occassions

Question

Very quick question. I'm relatively new to Expressionengine and unsure what could be causing my issue. So I have an Article template, inside of it I have comments:

<!-- Comments -->
        <div class="comments">
            <div class="existing-comments">
                <h3> Comments </h3>
                {exp:comment:entries sort="desc"}
                <div class="comment">
                    <div class="initial">
                        {if no_results}
                            <p class="center"> Be the first to write a comment. </p>
                        {/if}
                        <p>
                            {comment}
                        </p>
                        <span class="posted-by">Posted by <a href="{if url}{url}{if:else}#{/if}">{name}</a> on <strong>{comment_date format="%Y %m %d"}</strong></span>
                    </div>
                </div>
                {/exp:comment:entries}
            </div>
            <div class="comment-form">
                <h3> Leave a comment </h3>
                {exp:comment:form channel="blog_post" rules:name="required|email=required|comment=required"}
                    <ol>
                        <li>
                            <label>YOUR NAME<span>*</span></label>
                            <input type="text" name="name" value="{name}" required/>
                            {if error}
                            <p class="error">Name is a required field. </p>
                            {/if}
                        </li>
                        <li>
                            <label>YOUR EMAIL<span>*</span></label>
                            <input type="email" name="email" value="{email}" required/>
                            {if error}
                            <p class="error">Please enter a valid email. </p>
                            {/if}
                        </li>
                        <li>
                            <label>YOUR WEBSITE</label>
                            <input type="text" name="url" value="{url}" required/>
                        </li>
                        <li>
                            <label>YOUR COMMENT<span>*</span></label>
                            <textarea name="comment">{comment}</textarea>
                            {if error}
                            <p class="error">Comment is a required field </p>
                            {/if}
                        </li>
                        <li class="captcha">
                            {if captcha}
                                  {captcha}
                            {/if}
                        </li>
                        <li class="submit"><button type="submit">POST COMMENT</button></li>
                    </ol>
                {/exp:comment:form}
            </div>
        </div>

For some reason on only some of the articles the comment form and exp:comment:entries dissapear. 95% of articles are fine. Could you see if I made a mistake somewhere? Gone through 100 times through the code cant spot the difference.

I should also probably point out that comments are not nested. I use reCaptcha(if this makes a difference). Anybody encountered issue like this before?

Here is affected url: http://www.yourpeakstate.com/blog/the-4-secrets-to-living-your-dream-life-1

Answer 1

The ReCaptcha should not make a difference, it should invalidate the comment form and show errors.

As Balloonatic implies, review your comment settings as a first step.

Because you say this only affects like 5% of your articles, I would check the Options tab on the affected articles, in there is a check box for "Allow Comments", is this unticked on the affected articles? If so, there ya go.

The other things to check are :

• Flood Control (Have you just posted a comment)
• Member Group Comment Posting Priviledges

There is a flood control mechanism in EE, if it's a case of comment section disappearing on articles where I've just posted a comment I'd look into that (pretty long shot).

There are also a bunch of comment settings in the member group priviledges, check these as well. Are you looking at the site as a guest or while logged in?

• Comment Posting Priviledges
  • Can submit comments
  • Exclude member from comment moderation
• Comment Administration
  • Can Moderate Comments
  • Can view comments in channel entries authored by others
  • Can edit comments in their own channel entries
  • Can delete comments in their own channel entries
  • Can edit comments in ANY channel entries
  • Can delete comments in ANY channel entries

I'v highlighted some of the more applicable ones, have you checked the authors of the entries affected? perhaps this is affecting the 5%?

Edit 1 Some more ideas

Short of jumping into the core code and sticking some debugging trace style messages in there (line 148[ee2.10.1] of file /system/expressionengine/modules/comment/mod.comment.php is a good starting point if your interested) I'd ask you to compare an entry that works 100% and one that doesn't and note down any and all differences in the hunt for clues.

Perhaps try using the entry_id parameter in case there's something fudged in the dynamic handling on exp:comment:entries?

Also whats the status setup and expired/future entries setup is on this channel? Theres code in the comments module that filters comments on statuses (I've seen issues with this too!) and expired/future entries.

Answer 2

Have you enabled guest posts? Go to Admin -> channel administration -> channel form. Than select "yes" for "allow guest posts" at the blog_post channel. You can also use the parameter allow_comments="yes" instead.

Is this post indeed in the blogpost channel which you have specified in your tag?

Edit:

Now I also notice that your comment:entries tag is not showing any text

• Are your comment tags placed inside your channel tag? If so, place them outside.
• As a last option you could als try to use the tag like this: {exp:comment:form channel="blog_post" dynamic="no" url_title="{segment_2}" rules:name="required|email=required|comment=required"}