Experiencing issues when trying to read comments on the site?
It appears you’re not alone, mon ami.
A number of readers have been in touch to report issues commenting on this site in recent weeks.
We use Disqus (boo, hiss) as our commenting system, but the reports of it being bwoken increased substantially after we enabled conditional loading for the Disqus comment embed (to make page loading times considerably faster).
It could be related.
However, in the messages we’ve been sent/seen so far there isn’t an obvious commonality. The issue(s) crops up on Chromium-based browsers in Linux …but also in Firefox on Windows, Safari on macOS, iOS etc. It also doesn’t seem to affect everyone, on every article, every time.
As I can’t replicate the issue(s) locally myself, trying to zone in on the cause is proving difficult.
Hence this post. I’m here to a) let you know we’re aware there is an issue (it’s not just you) with comments, and b) to ask those of you who are able/willing to provide it, to give us a bit more detail about your set-up.
As the comment section is phasing in and out of existence it won’t be much use here, so I put together a Google Form (boo, hiss, but I can’t find anything usable that’s better) for you to file the issues in. If you’re allergic to Google products you can send us an anonymous email using the on-site contact form.
Thanks for all your feedback, folks.
If you are NOT experiencing issues with commenting at all it’d be helpful to know that, too! In your case let me know all is well down in the comment section.