Spam coming in, actual Comments aren’t

I’ve had this happen on several blogs I’ve helped ppl set up – and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happens. (Anyone else know the answer?)

However, I will tell you how I fixed it – I uploaded fresh copies of the comments.php file from the themes they were using. I grabbed a new copy of the theme and put the new file in. If you’ve edited comments.php you’ll lose any edits you made, but it fixes the issue. (Or it least it always has for me.)

It looks like you’re using a modified version of Benevolence – if so, grab a fresh copy from here: https://www.thoughtmechanics.com/templates . Back-up the copy of comments.php you have out there now, and put the comments.php from that package on your site. You can try to troubleshoot comparing the files and such, but I never did figure out what went wrong.

hmm, didn’t seem to have an effect. i think i tried that before to no avail. thanks though…

My next guess would be a new copy of wp-comments-post.php, but then I’m guessing you’ve tried that…

It’s odd though, because when I had this problem, if I tried to submit a comment I got an actually completely blank page. (Which is what I thought you meant.) When I tried to leave a comment on your site, I got a “Sorry no posts matched your criteria.” message – so it’s doing something.

Sorry. I’m not sure where to go next… anyone else wanna jump in here?

What sorts of plugins are we running?

The only plugins I have active are weighted categories 1.2 and WP database backup 1.7. When you leave your name with the comment you get a “no posts match criteria” and when you type only in the comment box you get a blank page. Strange.

I did also re-install wp-commments-post.php but alas, no fix.

I have a hunch that it’s my server, and of course my server (bluehost) will point the finger back to wordpress….

Any more ideas?

fixed. oddly it was my sidebar php that was the problem. i’ll have to be careful when i’m modifying.