UPDATED – Ongoing issue with inability to vote or comment

UPDATE 3/21 –
1. There should now be NO more problems for subscribers logging in to the site. If an issue persists for you please let us know

2. We understand there are a few persistent issues with the “invalid nonce” return. We are continuing to look into it, but in the meantime if you just hit “post comment” a second time that will usually work.

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UPDATE 3/20 – The rollback seems to have fixed the problem, for most of you at least. We are talking to the devs at WPDiscuz about this. If any of you are still having this problem let us know in a comment below or email us at the address below.

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UPDATE – We have rolled back to the previous version of the comment software – We’d appreciate any feedback on whether this has cured this issue for you

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Hi all – as you have probably noticed, for the last 24 hours or so there has been a fairly major issue with our comments function.

About 11am GMT yesterday we were hit with what was probably a DDoS (denial of service) attack which temporarily took the site down.

Coincident with that the comment software began to return an “invalid nonce” error when anyone tried to leave a comment, and at the same time when anyone attempted to vote for any existing comment they received the message “you can’t vote for your own comment”.

We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this problem since then. We are exploring the possibility it’s something to do with the latest WPDiscuz update. We are also looking in to it being something to do with the site’s caching.

We don’t think it was directly connected with the DDoS at this stage.

A major difficulty with pinning down the problem is the fact it seems to be intermittent and to have some variables we don’t quite understand.

Some browsers seem to be more prone to returning the error than others, but this can also seem to vary from device to device.

If you guys would like to experiment and send us your feedback it might help us fix this thing all the sooner.

If you try to comment and fail to get through you can email us at [email protected] or message us on X(Twitter).

And if you are trying to comment and you’re getting the “invalid nonce” response, try a hard refresh of the page as that sometimes works, at least temporarily.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Let’s hope it gets resolved before too much longer.

We will update with any developments