Global Moxie

Question

When I try to add a comment or use the “email this page” feature, nothing happens. I’m returned to the original page with no confirmation message, and the message never appears. What can I do?

Answer

This typically indicates a problem with server-side includes (SSIs) on your server. This issue is particularly common on servers hosted by Dreamhost (the company is aware of the issue but as of this writing have not fixed this configuration issue).

Big Medium relies on server-side includes—specifically, the “config timefmt” command—as one element of its anti-spam measures. If the server does not properly support this command, then all comment and e-mail submissions will be treated as spam and ignored.

There is a workaround for this problem on Apache web servers:

1. First, be sure that server-side includes are enabled on your server.

2. Add the following line of code to the .htaccess file in the top-level directory of your site, where the homepage file is stored. (If no .htaccess file exists, go ahead and create one with the following line):

   SSITimeFormat "%S%j%m%M%Y%H%d"
   

After making that addition, comment and e-mail submissions should work properly.

(An unfortunate side-effect to this workaround is that the <%today%> widget will now show a nonsensical mess of numbers instead of the actual date.)