Burnt Orange Report

Comments Working Again

By Byron LaMasters

Comments are now working again. My apologies for taking so long. It has been a frustrating four days, but everything is working now, so go ahead and start commenting again. If you're interested in the full story for our comment problem, take the jump to the extended entry.

I have to say that in my 20 months of using Dreamhost, this was the first time where I was genuinely perturbed with their service. Apparently, a week ago, Dreamhost made an announcement requesting that MoveableType users upgrade to version 3.15, or otherwise be subject to a stoppage of some services. Unfortunately, since I only received the "Level 5" or "most urgent emails", I don't recall receiving that notification (I've since signed up to receive level 2-5 emails from Dreamhost). Then on Friday, Dreamhost disabled my mt-comments.cgi file, thus disabling all comments. I read through the latest Dreamhost announcements, noticed the request to upgrade to MT 3.15 (I was using MT 3.121), and upgraded. Then, I emailed Dreamhost back asking them to enable my mt-comments.cgi file. Dreamhost usually responds to support requests within 24 hours, but it took them nearly 60 hours to fulfill this request.

They finally responded to my request stating that the comments should be working, so I checked, and the comments still were not working, and I promptly filed out another support request last night. This afternoon, I finally decided to go into my ftp program and look at the properties of the mt-comments.cgi file. Sure enough, the permissions were set at 200, so I changed it to 755, checked to see if the comments worked, and sure enough they did. Overall, I've had a great experience with Dreamhost, but this was quite frustrating. Still, I'd recommend Dreamhost - it's $10/month, their service is generally pretty good, and until our traffic increases by a factor of ten, we won't have to pay any more for additional bandwidth.