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Having trouble commenting on our site?

Having trouble commenting on our site?

We’d like to hear from you

Are you having trouble commenting on our site? YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

We’ve received emails from several readers who are having difficulty commenting. We’re still trying to pinpoint the issue but have a few working theories.

We’ve been unable to replicate the problems readers are having on our end, so, if you’ve had trouble commenting recently, we’d like to hear from you. To help us resolve the issue quicker, please provide the following information in the comments beneath this post. If you’re unable to comment, you can send relevant info to the email address in this link.

Info we need:

  • Are you having difficulty leaving comments every time you come to the site or only intermittently?
  • What browser are you using, and is it up to date?
  • What operating system are you using (Mac, PC)?

In the meantime, we appreciate your patience. We’ll let you know as soon as the issue is resolved.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read our posts and for being part of the LI community. We appreciate each and every one of you.

Update: Are you using an ad blocker?

We’re finding that for many users, ad blockers are conflicting with our comment section. If you’re having difficulty commenting and use an ad blocker, try disabling it and see if that works. If you do this, please leave you feedback in the comments beneath or by emailing at the address in the link above.

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Comments

Rarely comment, but here I am

How about a negative data point? No problems here in San Antonio, accessing through Grande Communications via cable modem. Using Pale Moon 27.2.0/64 bit (updated just a few days ago) in Windows 7.

I’ve had several comments disappear without a trace after I hit submit. Using Chrome on a Mac.

amatuerwrangler | March 23, 2017 at 11:34 pm

I am running Windows 7 on ACER notebook, Firefox browser, ver 52.0.1
I get the -Leave a Comment- line, but no space to place the message. It has been this way for about 3 days… Now the kicker: if I disable the ad blocker, the comment thingy works, as you see.

I would love to comment but I can’t.

I’ve not had a problem for many months. There was a period of time were it was wacky, didn’t matter which browser I used, MS edge, chrome, or firefox. The wacky was, typing a comment would just stop, nothing would occur. At one point I just used notepad to type the comment and then paste it.

Win 10 or XP, it made no difference. But whatever the problem was, it disappeared.

This afternoon I tried to comment, but a ad was still loading. It took a full minute for the ad to load. The only clue was the message at the bottom of the screen. If I tried to type, the browser went berserk. After the ad finished, everything was fine.

The only problem I’ve had with commenting on the site is the lack of an ‘EDIT’ button.

I use Mac (iphone, ipad, macbook pro). My issues with commenting is that 90% of the time you hit submit and it hangs up and then dumps you out with the comment not sent. So I just stopped commenting.

I tried making the comments short but the length did not seem to matter. I wonder if this one will get through.

Subotai Bahadur | March 24, 2017 at 12:31 am

I can comment, but I cannot vote thumbs up or down, which from what I gather is the norm for the voting now. Have you officially taken down the voting?

Would that this issue applied only to Rags! . . .

“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation”

I’m using Firefox, with the Adblock Plus plugin, and this problem first showed up a few days ago. Disabling the plugin for this site fixed it. I conclude that some update you applied a few days ago makes the comment box look to the plugin like an ad, which it therefore blocks.

I had tried disabling the plugin on this site a few months ago, when Prof Jacobson asked people to do so, but as soon as I did it the site started crashing my browser, so I reenabled it. I’m now on a machine with more memory, and apparently it can handle your ads without crashing, so here I am.

I use Chrome regularly and can not comment. But using Microsoft Edge I can leave comments.

I’m on Windows 10. Both browsers are up to date.

After seeing another comment on AdBlock Plus I turned my Adblock off in Chrome for the site and I can now comment using the Chrome browser. (Thanks Milhouse)

Hey Kemberlee! 2-3 days ago, I noticed that the tally of thumbs up and thumbs down votes changed … what I see in Chrome under Win 7 (current on all updates), is that the tally of the thumbs up disappeared … there’s just one number now, to the right of the thumb down. I can still vote and just did on the top 3 comments in this post. Hitting the up thumb on the first 2 posts did nothing – hitting the thumb down on the same posts said I’d already voted. When I hit the thumb down on the 3rd post, it registered with a 1.

To the person who wrote the 3rd post – I feel no particular animosity towards you or your post. 😉 Just testing to see what the hell is going on here like any good beta tester should.

    MrE in reply to MrE. | March 24, 2017 at 1:38 am

    Hey dummy! Read the comments next time before posting … if you had done that, you’d see that disabling adblocker is the fix … guess what … thumbs up and down tallies are back now.

      herm2416 in reply to MrE. | March 24, 2017 at 7:49 am

      Dual personality, eh?!
      Sorry, my finger slipped on the thumbs down, which apparently works, even though I don’t have an ad blocker! iPad, safari. My only issue is the slow response time to the thumb up/down.

Eastwood Ravine | March 24, 2017 at 3:08 am

I comment when I can, but I do when news moves me to do so.

I just wrote a comment, apparently took too long typing, was told to “reload”, and lost my entire body of work.

Sucks, because it was good, too.

Adding, I would like to be able to view comments in “newest first” order while you are at it.

Paul In Sweden | March 24, 2017 at 4:31 am

Disabling Adblock for https://legalinsurrection.com on FF resolved the comment problem for me.

This is a test. Brave works, but FF does not ( as others note with AB ). I’ve saved the good page from brave to a file and loaded it in FF. I get the Comment Box which I load the saved page. I’m going to submit this. If it works then you will know it is something either on the server side or perhaps some srtuff ( probably javascript ) which modifies the page before it is rendered.

Kind of stupid from some ad company. Like when Sony deliberately put viruses on computers playing their music CDs. ( I still don’t know how Sony is still in business after that. If a person did this he would be doing hard time now. )

In the past I occasionally had problems with comments due to Privacy Badger. I just re-enabled it for this site and it now appears to NOT cause problems. I also had problems with an ad blocker, but I white listed Legal Insurrection long ago, so that stopped being an issue.

No problems thus far.

fatolddrunkguy | March 24, 2017 at 7:22 am

My browser will log in late at night and leave inappropriate and controversial comments. Sometimes I will find the comments page still open when cleaning up a pile of empty beer cans. Any idea what causes this?

Commenting fdom my old Android cellphone. Issues with screen placement. No place to put name, email addressn website.

I have had no problems in commenting. I wonder if the CIA is involved?

    Old0311 in reply to natdj. | March 24, 2017 at 10:19 am

    More than likely the Russians are attempting to deprive us of you insight. I think they are angry because their candidate lost.

I could never preview a comment when I used Internet Explorer.. I switched to Firefox and that issue was resolved. I did notice that in the recent past there were sometimes over 40 scripts running on this site.. sometimes 46!!
I only see 11 today, so maybe that was a fix?

Seldom comment. Using Firefox, latest version, on WIN7 64-bit. If this appears, then no problem today.

I had been having problems with the site loading smoothly, but it turned out it was a problem with my wireless router. A new router fixed that.

I haven’t had any problems posting comments. No ad blocker, using latest version of Chrome & Win 7.

But, my comments are generally brilliant and insightful, so maybe the NSA doesn’t mess with them.

😀

I haven’t had trouble commenting after logging in but logging in was the problem. Today, it works. Formerly, I had to disable Adguard, leave Firefox and use Chrome. Strangely, today there’s no problem.

Using Win7, Firefox. Completely up-to-date.

Opera worked fine, but as soon as I used FF I was blocked from commenting. I could log in, but couldn’t comment. After tinkering with FireFox extensions I discovered that AdBlocPlus was the hindrance.

I disabled ADB and installed uBlock Origin instead.

Now everything works like always. Firefox + AdBlocPlus was the problem child.

William A. Jacobson | March 24, 2017 at 9:19 am

So it looks like people using ad blockers are having the problem. I’m not a vindictive person, but I wish I had thought of that and planned it. I’ll take out my tiny violin for all the people who use ad blockers, and play them a lullaby.

    Now, Professor, that’s just mean!

    😀

    casualobserver in reply to William A. Jacobson. | March 24, 2017 at 9:54 am

    To be fair – ad servers are all over the place and can be effing frustrating. I don’t find LI to have an egregious problem, but occasionally the page can take a minute or minutes to fully load. So, as others have noted, interfacing with the page is a problem (scrolling, typing, etc.). For that reason I often use Chrome with full blocking for some sites that are especially bad offenders and MS Edge when I want to be a “nice guy” and allow ads when I make routine visits to sites that almost always play nice. Almost always I keep both browsers open so it is a simply matter of clicking one or the other to make my routine visits.

    Although it shouldn’t matter – I have a modern machine (Quad core) with gobs of memory (8 MB) running Win10 and connecting using high speed broadband/cable. So there should almost never be hardware/system limitations on my end. But there are. Some sites are especially bad because they simultaneously autoplay multiple advertising videos that are placed on the page. Stupid. Those FORCE me to use Chrome and block nearly everything. Again, I say, stupid.

    YOUR ADS ARE OPPRESSING ME!

    I need to go to my safe space and lie down.

    Virtue Signalling Alert: I disabled my AdBlockers when you requested it months ago. (For some reason, though, my comments haven’t gotten any more intelligent.)

    Note to Kemberlee: I sure love the graphics you ad to your posts. The burning computer makes me laugh almost as hard as the dumpster fire or the train wreck. I guess I’m just simple minded.

    Well Professor, I’m sure the snark was amusing, but you need a quick introduction to the realities of the internet.

    1. The single most common source of viruses and malware is ads on various sites.
    2. Most sites, like this one, aren’t the offenders; it’s their automatic ad feeds. Usually, they aren’t aware of the problem unless someone complains.
    3. They also aren’t interested in knowing, because that might mean they would have to do something about it. Your comment is a prime example of this attitude.
    4. Because of that, I don’t disable ad blockers. Not for Forbes, not for IBD, and not for you.
    5. If I find the site’s content useful and entertaining, I pay for a subscription or donate to it. That’s what I did HERE.

    Now you’re telling me that even that’s not good enough, that you’ll cripple the site even for subscribers unless they open up to possible malware. Seriously?

    I’ll leave you with a final thought: there’s a real trend in self-defense law to force property owners who want to ban patrons from legally carrying to assume 100% liability for defending those patrons. Why wouldn’t that principle extend to forcing websites who won’t allow their patrons to defend themselves from malware from assuming 100% liability when they allow it to be fed through their sites?

    seeing as how most malware is introduced though an ad system on third party servers you have zero control on maybe theres a specific place you can put that violin??
    your site could be infecting people and it would have nothing to do with your actual servers/content.
    think before you wise off.
    if that gets me banned oh well, I spend a good part of my time dealing with infected sites/pc’s due to ad servers out of everyones control.

    Not using adblockers on your site here, Professor, but seeing same/similar issues, so that may not be the culprit. Also seems unlikely to be due to a virus or malware introduced via an ad server, though that certainly does happen. The issues I’m seeing and have described above are occurring on both Chrome & Firefox (FF 52.0.1, installed only a week ago so that’s potentially relevant for FF). Hope you’re able to get it sorted out.

Various Apple products all using Safari… no problems.

I’m able to submit comments, but the Thumbs Up/Down ratings have been non-responsive for a couple of days. Device independent.

    Daiwa in reply to Daiwa. | March 24, 2017 at 1:04 pm

    On Chrome here. Also started having a problem early this week with certain links not opening in a new tab when I use the context menu option – have to drag the link to the tab bar to open it. This is entirely new but affects only certain websites, this being one of them. Still not able to rate – the thumb highlights on mouseover but clicking has no effect. Suspect it’s the same (or similar) issue preventing links opening in a new tab on selecting that option from the context menu but can’t be sure.

I sent Kemberlee a screen shot. Some of the cells are not formatting right on Firefox. It works fine in MS Edge. I am running Windows 10 32 bit. Most current Firefox. My ABP was causing problems, but was easy to turn off for LI.

The latest release of Firefox does not support Java app.

Support will end for all NPAPI plugins except for Flash in March 2017, when Firefox version 52 is released. See this compatibility document and this article for details.

Firefox has stopped the Java plugin from running automatically because of security issues. However, you can still activate Java on trusted sites. We’ll show you how.

If websites report that the Java plugin is not installed, can’t be detected, or is disabled in the browser, you won’t be able to activate Java. See Use the Java plugin to view interactive content on websites for help installing, updating, and enabling Java in Firefox

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Fix-slowness-crashing-error/How-to-allow-Java-on-trusted-sites/ta-p/6206

Commenting here, now, using Firefox on Mac OS 10.12.3. Firefox is new, downloaded no more than two weeks ago. The font looks like old-fashioned typewriter font. Scrolling through the articles is very jumpy and annoying.

Firefox is also burdened with commercial spyware, which I do not want and was presented only with an announcement that they would send me things that those pinheads think would interest me, which is why I object to using Firefox. I do not yet have an adblocker for Firefox.

My preferred browser is Safari. I use Adblock, but this site is whitelisted. What I see is that I am logged in, but the portion of the page that has “Leave a Comment” is at the very bottom of the page, and there is no way to scroll down to the comment block. I checked “Admin” and found my entry, which had all the required information. This problem is recent, starting this week. I comment almost daily, so onset of the problem for me can probably be pinpointed within hours.

FWIW, I comment at T_Donald at Reddit, but have not posted in a very long time, in an inoffensive manner. I am not on any of the ShareBlue lists that have surfaced at that site. My guess is that this is some ordinary glitch rather than an attack.

Also, I recently had to run through a series of browsers to find out what worked at USPTO.gov. Safari, which worked recently for one portion of the USPTO website, does not function (it is supposed to) for another. The claim at the other portion is that there is some sort of security feature that has been added.

This may be too much information, but it is the set of leads I have.

The ads on this site are particularly annoying. Not the worst I’ve ever endured, but pretty close. Besides the tacky “clickbait” annoyance, load times can be glacial.

Given that … turning off a blocker is not a realistic option.

All that happened here is that the silly thumbs up/down thing has gone wonky in Opera 30.0. I can see the “down” thumbs, but not the “up” ones. Perhaps that’s a “feature” even if inadvertent. Firefox 26.0 works OK, as does Microsoft SecurityHole 10.0.9200.16635. All of them old—I don’t use the latest updates of anything (for good but boring reasons I won’t explicate).

Commenting works ok using my kindle. On my laptop, I am using Firefox and started receiving a warning about insecure login about a week ago.

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Protect-your-privacy/Insecure-password-warning-in-Firefox/ta-p/27861

The can’t comment thread seems to be setting records for number of comments.

I will repeat the problem of ad loading time. It varies, but when it’s bad, the page takes more than a minute to load. You can’t comment during this time.

My Safari works fine. I am actually a fan of Firefox since I grew up on netscape. Always stayed away from IE (Internet Exploder) and Microsoft was known for security issues and not parsing html correctly within standards.

Not sure what happen with the latest release of Firefox, but I have found myself using other browsers. Looks like I might have to jailbreak my son’s fire to get a working browser on that.

Firefox had the best plugins so that is one of the reasons I stayed with it. Time have changed and with mobile apps, the focus seems to be there. Safari has delays in video play back that are worst then firefox. I think I read somewhere it has to do with the codex translation.

I know you don’t like Ad blockers but I whitelist LI. I also have a plug in with firefox to block google analytic.

I just looked up my google analytics blocker and discovered that it does not block outbound, so google still gets my data.
Just means I don’t get the return results back.

Google scares me with all the content they collect.

Wish I could reply at TOP of comments section instead of scrolling all the way to bottom, but otherwise all seems functional. Chrome on PC Win 10.

I have not had comment problems, but loading LI using Chrome/Wind10 takes forever. I use brave to load on computer. I have no trouble loading LI on my iPhone, but do thumbs up/down show up on mobile? I don’t see them on iPhone.

    smalltownoklahoman in reply to scfanjl. | March 24, 2017 at 1:14 pm

    Having a similar problem on my Samsung Tablet. I don’t see the thumbs or the number of up votes on a post but I do see the number of down votes.

Comments are not necessary in many cases. Too many by too few. So maybe it’s not all bad.

That said, the ratings system seems wacky at this time.

ublock can and will block the wordpress comment block with certain filters enabled. iirc fanboys social was one that did it

Discovered 2 problems that arose recently.I’m using Firefox 52.0.1, Win 7
1) Had to disable all content blockers, which I had never had to do before, to get the login message
2) On the WordPress login I get a message that it is an INSECURE login
Hope this info helps.

Who put the comment box on the bottom? S/B at the top

Sufferfortribe | March 24, 2017 at 3:39 pm

I can comment. I’ve just been too lazy to sign in.

Turned off my ad blocker and the comment box shows up after logging in.

Never going to give up my Ad blocker.

DINORightMarie | March 24, 2017 at 5:58 pm

Hello Professor. I have been reading and commenting since your site launched back in 2008. I’ve never had any problems with commenting. I have used Windows laptops and my Mac laptop, both via Firefox. No problems.

I have had things that won’t display due to my ad blocker – e.g. Tweets don’t show the graphics, just the msg., or surveys don’t display so I can take them anymore.

I use my ad blocker simply because I have had to clean/disinfect my computer restore it too many times due to ads that I’ve clicked, or cookies-malware they have placed on my machine.

I will continue to read, and to comment. Your site is by far the best on the net, IMHO.

(Note: right now I am having a problem seeing the thumbs-up count…..I can see the thumbs-down one, though. Strange….)

Thank you for all you do!! You make the conservative world a better place – actually ALL of the world a better place. 🙂

Turned my adblocker on and off again, now able to comment. This is odd, because I had not changed my settings. Am now using Safari.

MaxWebXperienZ | March 25, 2017 at 12:56 pm

It was the ad blocker…

What Ad Blocker? I’ve got Adblock Plus and no issues.

It takes so long for the site to load that I often give up and move on.

This is the first time I’ve gotten a comment field.

I’ve also got Ad Blocker Plus but have an up to date Firefox 45.8.0 and an up to date Slackware Linux 14.2 on an i7 intel.

At no time was I not logged in to legalinsurrection.com so I figured that it was the ad blocker.

I notice that there is an effort to deny the net to any who don’t like active ads. I don’t mind stationary ads but don’t like ads forcibly shoved down my optical throat.

amatuerwrangler | March 29, 2017 at 11:05 pm

My, my, my… This morning my Firefox 53.0.1 told me that my browser was being updated and my entry to cyberspace would be delayed for a minute… and in fact, I did get in. Visiting LI tonight I see that the “thumbs up” count is visible, as is the “down” count. This did not occur when the Ad blocker was on and before the update of FF. I see that my FF is now version 52.0.2. This comment is made with the Ad Blocker activated.
Just thought I would update in case anyone is still interested. I had commented that I was unable to comment without shutting down the ad blocker the first night the post came up.