Visitors missing comments on stories today

We received this message at 8:37 a.m. today:

The comment engines on www.newsok.com appear to be out of order. None of the stories have comments and none of the comments are “sticking.” I find it rather strange that its now 8 AM and there are “0″ comments about the Obama inauguration front page story. It just has to be a server error of some kind.

This is odd. And we had already been looking at the problem. We noticed the issue early this morning when it seemed equally odd to us that no comments had been made on our top stories.

By 9:15 a.m., new comments were being seen on the site. By 10 a.m., all other under-the-covers problems with the comments were fixed.

We’re back to normal now. Our “Remaking America” story now has 88 comments.

The problem stemmed from our tweaks to the commenting system last night, after one of our users spent the day abusing our open commenting system. The user’s comments deteriorated the atmosphere on our comments and ruined the experience for the rest of the group on our site.

However, often when you make a series of programming additions to your site, something can go wrong. Early this morning, we saw the problem.

Sorry for the glitch. Comment away. Just keep them clean, so I don’t have to claw out my eyes as I read the comments.