Back in November I upgraded the server that this site, among several others, is hosted upon. This involved going to new versions of several webserver software products, including PHP. The new version of PHP required me to make a change to the comment script that I, among several others, use.

I just discovered the reason that my comment script, among several others’, hasn’t been storing the email addresses of commenters. (I’m not talking about displaying the addresses. I don’t want that, and I’ve disabled that accordingly.) This means that if I wanted to reply to a comment directly, well, it wasn’t gonna happen.

What, then, was the culprit? I didn’t capitalize a letter ‘m’ during a variable declaration. That’s it. Had I typed ‘M’ instead of ‘m’, I’d have saved myself nearly six months of losing those email addresses in my site’s, among several others’, comment files.

I have, of course, fixed this on my site, among several others.

Let me tell you what kind of moron I’m feeling like right now: top-notch, baby.

UPDATE: Yeah, commenting’s been broken all afternoon. I’ve been tweaking the hell out of the script, and finally managed to accomplish very rudimentary email-address validation. Now, if you don’t enter an email address, your comment doesn’t get posted. It’s that simple. As always, though, your address isn’t displayed anywhere. I insist on it mainly so that I can reply to comments personally and privately if I so choose. We apologize for the inconvenience…