Long time, no write everyone.

It was... May, I think, maybe a bit earlier, when I discovered that site comments had stopped working.

The comments tool wasn't something I had ever really looked at since taking over the site because it was "working," and why mess with what works? Turns out I was wrong. The ultimate problem was that the version of PHP (our scripting language) was updated and the old comments tool had not been updated in many years. It became incompatible and failed silently. Old comments were still visible but nothing new could be submitted.

In addition, we are looking down the barrel of a site wide upgrade to move to the newest version of the software that runs the whole site and having a busted old comments tool was definitely going to impact that process.

Looking under the hood I also found a serious problem of which I was entirely unaware.

There are about 1,700 legitimate comments scattered across the posts on this site and are, to me, some of the most important things to preserve as a record of our community activity. Newer followers may not know this but in the early years, supplying all the information for each episode of Henry's and Iggy's shows was a group effort. Generally the person running the site at the time would record and post the audio and then dedicated listeners would listen to the show, write down the track list, and submit it as a comment.

I badly wanted to preserve that history across upgrades.

Unfortunately, spam bots had attacked the comments tool and even though they were detected and not published, they were still there, cluttering up the management interface and database. All told, I had to delete over 100,000 spam comments to save the 1,750 legitimate ones. In the process I probably deleted a few legit comments that got caught up in the spam filters, but that couldn't be avoided.

Dedicated listener Steve has the honor of being the last legitimate commenter on 28 December, 2020: http://www.rollins-archive.com/iggy/iggy-2020/1402-iggy-confidential-255-december-25-2020

Until now.

I ended up buying a new comment tool because the paid version had the ability to import our old comments so, fingers crossed, we are ready to get the comments section back AND are primed for the sitewide upgrade that I'll kick off at the very latest, in November, 2022.

Once again, I appreciate everyone who comes to this site each week and thanks for sticking around.