Dance of the gremlins

Some very, very strange things have been happening with Blogger over the last few days.

At first, I was inclined to think that it was just a glitch with my World Cup discussion thread page, which has now grown quite HUGE (over 100 comments and more than 20,000 words), and might well be maxing out either Blogger's servers or the display capacity of my browser.

However, similar problems were manifesting themselves with the comments on other posts, on both my blogs.

Often the comment form would fail to download. Or it would do so, grudgingly, but fail to display the comment verification word; so I'd have to close the window and try all over again. When I did manage to open a workable comment window, it would usually crash when I hit 'Submit' - but then I'd find (eventually) that the comment had gone through OK after all.... in duplicate. And then we got into the real weirdness, with comments going through to the 'notification' folder in my e-mail account, but not appearing on the blog for days; then, at last, they'd turn up on the blog; then disappear again. And the 'number of comments' indicator has been all over the place - seemingly disjoined from the actual total of comments: sometimes showing more than there in fact were, sometimes less, and regularly failing to acknowledge the deletion or addition of comments. Bizarre!

It was such a range of odd cyberworld phenomena that I was starting to feel a little paranoid - fretting that perhaps the goons at Kafka Central were trying to interfere with my Net link again, or that things were going awry because Blogger was getting confused by something about the way my proxy functions, or that I had picked up some particularly ingenious kind of virus on my computer.....

All nonsense, of course. It's just Blogger being a bit loopy. It has to be - doesn't it?

Ah, but then...... I hit a strange glitch with Yahoo Mail earlier today as well, where every time I clicked on a mail in my Inbox display I was routed instead to an old mail in my 'blog comment notification' folder. WTF??!! What is going on here????

Anyway, my apologies to any of you who have been trying to follow the comments on one or more of my posts and have been irritated or confused by all the repetitions over the past few days. Not my fault, I assure you.