After spending all day today — argh! — implementing a new fix from Disqus, the lost-comments situation is dramatically better. I’m aware of at least two posts — the reviews of Gemini Man and Raya and the Last Dragon — that are still missing their historical comments, and there may be more (let me know if you come across any posts that you think may be missing comments). But most posts appear to have all their original comments restored.
I continue to work with Disqus to resolve the lingering issues and will update you asap.
PREVIOUS 03.29.23: “I’m trying to fix the issue of missing comments”
As a few readers have been discussing here, there are many (like, thousands) of comments missing from some posts back when I was using Disqus for commenting. (I think the missing comments are mostly from around 2018ish–2019ish, but I’m not entirely sure.)
In the early days of Disqus (everywhere Disqus was used, not just here), a comment posted would be saved both in Disqus’s databases as well as in the databases of the host sites. At some point — without announcing this change — Disqus stopped saving comments on the host site. When I learned about this, I started using the backup Disqus provided to sync comments — which included retroactive syncing — but clearly, that did not work as well as it was supposed to. And when I try to sync the comments now (they still exist at Disqus), the process quits after syncing just a few comments.
I’ve got a troubleshooting ticket in with Disqus, and hopefully they will find an fix for this. They’d better! Those comments belong to this site and the readers who posted them here, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get them back.
In the meantime, you may start seeing some of those comments start to dribble back… such as on my review of Captain Marvel, which should have hundreds of comments (it’s even showing a count at the top of the review of 399) but only eight are actually appearing on the page.
I’ll keep you updated…
