There were some reports from people about not being able to post very long comments. Credible reports only came from two users. One was kind enough to email me the comment he could not post, so I was able to investigate the issue. Indeed, with Google Chrome, my blog timed out repeatedly. However, with Firefox, the comment went through right away. It is my perception that this issue only affects a minuscule number of comments. If you’re having that issue, split up your post into two parts. That should do the trick. Otherwise, try using Firefox. Google is big on diversity hiring, so, clearly, something has to give. I consider this issue closed.
No big deal if you don’t publish this comment, but here’s an interesting thought. Several years ago, I had a client report a similar issue. Turns out that any time you tried to make an HTTP POST with words like “select”, “insert”, etc. in the body, the request timed out, and this was due to overzealous packet filtering by the hosting company. If you have the original comments, I’m wondering if there’s a certain type of word that might be causing something similar… or, perhaps you’re right that it’s simply the length of it.
Of course that wouldn’t explain why it would work in Firefox and not in Chrome, but perhaps the hosting company has seen hack attempts with Chrome user agent strings but not with Firefox ones. (So maybe high-ish length + Chrome user agent string = hack attempt, according to your hosting company’s fucked up logic.) As an aside, assuming you have access to the logs of the server, and you’re not even seeing the requests make it to your logs, calling the hosting company might be the best bet.
That’s interesting. Thanks for pointing this out.
I am 100% certain its not overall length. I had huge comments go through. And then I’d have a comment that couldn’t go through. I’d subsplit it in many parts. And some of these shorts parts would refuse to post. So its definitely not length.
I think length just increases the odds of there being enough of those words to trigger the issue.
As a Firefox user I can confirm I never encountered the timeout issue.
I can confirm the Firefox solution works on mobile.
I just posted a comment on the open thread. This is a comment that refused to post with android chrome. Kept crashing.
I finally got it to post by installing firefox. Comment went through just fine in seconds.
I had issues posting a comment and tried using firefox.
I’m using chrome to post this comment but I used firefox to reply on the Open Forum recently.
There’s a long comment of yours in the Open Thread that went through fine.
Hi Aaron: To clarify – that long comment went through after I used Firefox. I originally tried posting via Chrome but I had that weird timeout issue. Not sure if the timeout was due to length or content.
Anyways, Firefox seems to be the tool to overcome the timeout.
That sounds like exactly my issue. Thus, for now the working hypothesis remains that it is an issue related to Google Chrome. Maybe some diversity push at Google is to blame for that. (Long comments discriminate against stupid people, which is why they have to be blocked by the browser.)