UPDATE: Comments Still Down

Our comments suddenly disappeared from our main page Wednesday afternoon, despite functioning for months.

This was not due to any action by me or other editors at TM-Free Blog.

I have been attempting to work with JS-Kit since approximately 5 pm Wednesday to restore the comments link—and easy access to posting and reading comments.

Unfortunately, JS-Kit is notorious for a poor product, virtually no documentation, and extremely poor customer service.

As of this writing they have done nothing from their side to fix the situation—or even explain what has happened.

From my side, I have restored a number of "templates" that worked perfectly for months, but simply do not work anymore. I also am exporting comments and archiving them in several places in case the comments totally disappear.

Unfortunately, some readers have speculated that this is an attempt to censor comments. If this were the case, I would have simply deleted the "Recent Comments" block in the right-hand sidebar so that no access whatsoever to the comments were possible.

Of course, this has not happened.

There still is limited access to comments available through the "Recent Comments" sidebar.

In addition, those of you who have a JS-Kit account, which many of you have signed up for by registering a name associated with your TMFB comments, have additional access to your comments. Either point your browser to http://js-kit.com/ , login, and then go to your "dashboard"; or more simply click on your name in any comment that you have made, then "view details," and you should have access to your JS-Kit account.

Because JS-Kit has simply not responded meaningfully in 4 days, I am working diligently with both Intense Debate and Disqus in an attempt to simply replace JS-Kit with a system that actually works.

In addition, there is the possibility that there has been a security breach either with Blogger or JS-Kit. I say this because admin settings changed several times in the days just prior to our comment links disappearing—sometimes denying me access totally to my JS-Kit account. Currently, I have no direct access to my own comments.

JS-Kit has not offered any explanation whatsoever about this situation either—despite my many inquiries.

My deepest apologies to all readers for this inconvenience. I join with commenter "alex" and several email correspondents who wonder about the coincidence that this situation arose shortly after Dr. Travis generously joined us here to discuss his research.

(Strangely, it happened just hours after I invited TM researchers and representatives to join the discussion. Additionally, my post in which I issue the invitation, has been edited by someone!)

There is not too much I can say about this coincidence other than that it was not done from anyone at TMFB.

I am the only admin of both the blog and the commenting system.

J.