It seems that there has been some unidentified weirdness going on.

When I posted Dirtroad Maintenance, the whole blog entry disappeared just like that. I thought that I had accidentally pressed some wrong keys, triggering unwanted operations. It was already midnight, I fetched couple of cans of beer and rewrote the blog post while it was still fresh in my memory. And forgot about the problem.

Then, when posting a first version of Overeating Potatoes, the same happened again - after hitting "Save", it gave no error message, just collapsed back to normal state without a slightest trace of the blog post anywhere. Uh oh. That time I was already too sleepy to rewrite the entry, so I tried again the next day. That time I was better prepared, every now and then both copypasting the text into a file on my own computer, and occasionally also saving a draft on the server. And eventually it worked out.

So, if there has been something similar with comments, there definitely is a problem somewhere. Only that I don't have any idea what it might be. I just checked the error log, and it has nothing related to this. It show the succesfully saved comments, and 98% of log messages are because of spam bots trying to break in, and the system stopping them. I checked couple of reports of comments blocked by CAPTCHA, and they try to pass the captcha by answers like: "outlet nike sapatos portugal" =)

Well, but without any sensible error messages it is rather tricky to trace the error, so I wish it is just a temporary problem and goes away by itself ...

When I set up this site, I had zero experience in server side programming, I only knew the basics of HTML and CSS, but I didn't even know what PHP is. Nor did I have a clear idea what all kind of functionality we might want to have on enormous elk site. So I just chose one framework, Drupal, which seemed flexible and efficient for many purposes. The good side is that with drupal it is pretty easy to set up different things like a blog or a daily picture album, and the comment functionality etc are ready-made. But the downside is that I have been too lazy to learn all the trick and details on how to exactly configure everything - and in case there is a problem in the drupal core functions, it feels tedious to dig into the code trying to figure out where to add custom code for bug hunting...

I guess there has been some temporary server-side problems with the database, in such a way that drupal code doesn't know how to handle the error situation, so instead of posting an error message it just collapses to the main function, effectively losing all the data on the input form.

If I had plenty of time, I'd rewrite the whole site with purely my own PHP code, then I could at least know what is what and which is where =)