I feel like this must be a dumb question, but I wanted to add a comment on one of the articles on the main Sitepoint website, but I don’t see how. There are a few comments already there, but at least in Firefox I see no comment form either above or below the existing comments, no way to log in to become more “legitimate”, or anything else that might change the status of things. What silly clue am I missing?
You don’t see something like this?
Is it an older article? Maybe comments have been turned off for it.
Hmm … I’m using Firefox 27 and all I can get is this:
TechnoBear, you do have JS enabled, right?
Oh yes - I enabled it specially.
The article I’m interested in is http://www.sitepoint.com/provisioning-phalcon-tools-vagrant/ which is Dec. 20, 2013, but I also checked a really recent one (http://www.sitepoint.com/hhvm-hack-part-1/) to see if age was the problem. After the article is the author bio, then a thing about getting a free book with a little form for one’s email address, then about 3cm of white space, and then the comments. After the comments is another cm or so of white space and then the gray footer area. (The comments are also styled oddly, with way too much horizontal indent for each bullet, so that by the 5th indent level the text is only about two words wide, but that’s probably unrelated unless I have a serious CSS problem that is also hiding comment forms.)
The comments for the first article you link to are closed.
The second one should be open, though.
I see that if I have JS disabled.
When I enable it, the comments vanish altogether and I just get the “loading” icon.
I don’t think I have ever disabled JS in my life - even my own personally created stuff would lose much functionality if it was turned off, so I know that’s not the case. I see comments (in the bad layout - like your screen capture), but no form and no “discus loading” indicator or anything like that.
Should I be expecting the form at the top of the comments list or the bottom?
I thought I’d experiment with the JS disable/enable concept just to see what would happen, but I can’t even find where to turn it off! I looked through all the Tools/Options tabs and saw nothing about scripting or JS… (Firefox 27)
Ah, you’ve been nipped by a (IMHO poor) decision made by the Firefox team.
Supposedly they felt having a javascript toggle wasn’t needed so you now need to have an addon to do it.
I thought enabled was the default, but maybe not.
You could go into about:config if you know what you’re doing to “hard-set” it, but an addon is probably the better way if you want to toggle eg.
JS Switch
SettingSanity
I’m sure that Enabled is the default, because I have a database app that I wrote and use all the time which would not work right if JS was off.
There are add-ons for Firefox, like the Developer tools, that make it easy enough to toggle JS. I have a little add-on for Chrome that does the same, placing a little JS icon in the main toolbar.
I think we’re getting off-topic - I don’t really need to toggle JS; I was just surprised that TechnoBear’s description of the comment styling with his JS off looked like mine with JS on, so I got curious.
I just want to see a comment form on posts that are accepting comments. (Secondarily, it would be nice if comments were styled more reasonably, but that is not my primary question.)
The point is, you need to have javascript enabled for the form to show (poor UX I know, but…) the styling is secondary
As you don’t see the form, it follows that for whatever reason, you do not have javascript enabled or are not loading the javascript file needed for the form.
The first link you posted also needs javascript to show the “closed”, do you see
Can you see the form/closed if you use a different browser?
Can you see the form/closed if you use a different browser?
I don’t know why I didn’t think of that!Yes, in Chrome I see everything.
The point is, you need to have javascript enabled for…
And my point was that I know I have Javascript enabled because I have JS code that I personally wrote that runs in my Firefox.
…or are not loading the javascript file…
Now that might indeed be a possibility, but it would take some digging to figure it out. I did look for Javacript errors, but there weren’t any. There were plenty of CSS errors (parsing errors, unknown properties, and such), but that wouldn’t cause whole forms to be invisible.
The first link you posted also needs javascript to show the “closed”, do you see…
No, I don’t in Firefox.
Here’s a screen capture from the Web Developer’s debugger (which I don’t really know how to use) showing the list of Javascript sources. They are all minimized, so I can’t tell what they do by glancing at the content. Do you know which one(s) are involved in the comments area?
Not some digging, a lot of digging. And as you say, though not all 32 files are long, being minimized complicates debugging.
Maybe @HAWK; will know someone familliar with the code involved.
The comments are served from Disqus, via an iframe.
I found the culprit. Recent versions of the Avast! Online Security browser plugin block Disqus as in the “Social Networks” category (why in Firefox but not in Chrome, I have no idea). If someone else is having this problem and finds this thread, you can change it for that session by clicking on the Avast icon in Firefox (green round “a” which may have an orange number in the corner) and then hovering over the Social Networks toggle switch until it expands to show the networks blocked in the current content. Disable blocking of Disqus, click the big X to close the Avast pullout, and the page will refresh with the Disqus content included.
I don’t know how to turn off Disqus blocking on a longer term basis - if someone else figures that out, do tell!
Thanks for taking the time to come back with a solution. Super helpful for others in the future and awesome forum etiquette. Much appreciated.