News Wire - Comments Format

[JOHN RICE]

Dear Trains Team,

Are their rules for the News Wire comment section?

The behavior of the comment threads appear to have changed once again.

You can reply to yourself, you can reply once to someone, but you can't reply to someone who replies to you.

This change seemed to have taken place right after there were extensive comments posted on the dispute over the BNSF Bridge in Bismarck, ND.  

Also another change observed, ones post was usually seen within 15-30 seconds after a browser refresh. Now a post cannot be seen for hours. In some cases there might be 4 or 5 comments queued up waiting to be seen and one would think they were the first to post.

Then a few hours later, they all come through and some repeat themselves.

Thanks for your feedback.

 

[Steve Sweeney]

Good morning, John.

We're working on the comments settings after a spate of spam posters flooded the website. Right now, we're approving all comments manually until IT can get a look at the site for a better fix. This sometimes results in a delay of comments appearing from a few hours to a couple of days. 

Thanks for asking!

-Steve

[Flintlock76]

There's something else rather strange going on, and it's been happeneing for a while.  Bear with me.

The "Trains" website has the "https" lead which tells me it's a secure website, but when I click on the various Forums I get a message saying "Connection to cs.trains is not secure.  This site does not support https."  What?

I can proceed to the Forums anyway after a slight delay but as I said these messages just don't make sense. 

[JOHN RICE]

Thank you sir! Posting spam is a big issue across a great many websites.

[Erik_Mag]

I'm writing this on a webpage with the URL beginning with https://cs.trains.com...

Before configuring Firefox for "HTTPS only mode" for all websites, the link to the forums would bring up an http:// URL. One change after the change was that the number of really annoying ads dropped like a rock.

[Overmod]

Flintlock76

The "Trains" website has the "https" lead which tells me it's a secure website, but when I click on the various Forums I get a message saying "Connection to cs.trains is not secure.  This site does not support https."

Sounds to me as if you have some kind of 'hosts' file that is automatically redirecting the forum calls to the 'old' addresses it's stored.

Depending on your browser and OS, clear out caches and any listings that reference the http:// version and see if that fixes the 'issue'.  DO NOT take the lazy Kalmbach IT way out and zap all the cookies...

[Flintlock76]

Thanks Mod-Man!  Actually, I do a cookie-clear about every other week or so and the "https" thing's been going on longer than that.  I'm not sure if I've got any "http" caches but I'll check.  

The flash from the Kalmbach site's not a major annoyance but it stuck me as rather strange.