Reader: Conversations view is broken

  • Unknown's avatar
    guidedicicles · Member ·

    Bug report.

    Error codes are generated continually for failure to load comments. The error notification slides down from the top of the screen, and they stack. They stack enough to fully obscure the site after a while, in fact. Although the messages seem to time out and disappear, they’re generated more quickly than that. I don’t think the website is failing to load a large number of comments, so it should be the result of retrying. I didn’t test leaving the page open and seeing if it stopped after a while. Behaviour is illogical and severely impacts site usage, almost to the point of not being usable at all.

    I encountered this on my phone: pixel 4a, Android, Firefox.

    I took a screenshot, but I feel too lazy to upload it elsewhere and link here.

  • fstat · Staff ·

    I checked your WordPress.com Reader and couldn’t view those error notifications. Please share that screenshot you grabbed so I can have a look and help you troubleshoot this.

  • Unknown's avatar
    guidedicicles · Member ·

    https://imgur.com/a/8wX2i5i

    It doesn’t significantly impact me, I can just not use that feature. Mostly submitted in the hopes it would be useful in helping you improve the platform, but if it’s rare and difficult to replicate don’t worry about it.

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    There is most like a self-hosted blog (most likely https://lightnovelstranslations.com/) that has our API module turned off, and that’s stopping us from allowing comments through. We need the site to be a Jetpack site, working with the Jetpack API, to be able to bring comments into our feed reader. To confirm, temporarily unsubscribe from the blog and see if the error goes away. If so, that is most likely the issue.

    I hope this helps.

  • Unknown's avatar
    guidedicicles · Member ·

    I went on a unfollowing spree and eventually the behaviour stopped, but idk what the triggers are. I removed the one you mentioned first, and it didn’t stop it.

    There are two things I recommend you change on your end.
    1) place a hard limit on how many notifications can be displayed at one time, regardless of the cause.
    2) forcefully terminate retries of trying to retrieve comments after a few attempts, to stop the message spam. If it’s a known issue that certain websites are unable to function within the reader view, and that can be identified, then it only needs to try once. It would also be more useful, in that case, if the error message said “unable to retrieve comments from [specific website].”

    It’s difficult to engineer systems that work well with every unusual edge case, and I get that, but you could definitely make your side of things fail more elegantly.

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    Thanks, I’m glad to hear that it cleared up eventually!

    We’ll look into this and do our best to ensure that it never happens again. :)

  • The topic ‘Reader: Conversations view is broken’ is closed to new replies.