4.17.2023

something strange going on with this blog: a sad update

I was so excited. 

I thought all the thousands of lost comments might be coming back.

Now I am let down all over again.

A few weeks ago, I noted that very old comments -- from 2005 and 2006 -- have been appearing in the spam queue of this blog. This gave me hope that the thousands of comments that were lost would be magically restored.

When a big chunk of wmtc was accidentally deleted, and Allan and I restored the posts by importing a Blogger XML file, the URLs of the posts changed. I didn't know if comments on posts with changed URLs would be published. If the URL has changed, would the relevant comments have a place to post?

I asked this question in the Blogger Help Community. Unfortunately, the Blogger Help Person never understood what I was asking. Granted, it is a strange concept, difficult to explain. But their comments made it clear that they were not reading what I wrote. Perhaps they were monitoring too many threads, and giving each only a cursory glance? 

Now I've been moderating comments from the spam queue (not the spam folder, as the BHP noted) for an additional three weeks, for a total of almost eight weeks. I am still moderating old comments daily, all from legit wmtc commenters. The majority are from July 2005 to June 2006; a few are from 2021. None are from July 2006 to February 2020, the time span of the lost comments. I assume that because the posts' URLs changed when we restored the posts, the comments have nowhere to go, so to speak.

If I was able to upload a specific XML file, I could narrow that to May 2019 to Feburary 2020. But I cannot import the file.

So, the situation has not changed. The comments are gone. I am finally beginning to accept it.

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