When you have a blog baby, getting an email from a loyal reader with this subject is pretty horrifying:

But then I thought, wait a minute, I’ve gotten some comments recently. But I took another look.

Come to find out, there were 2 versions of the site. The “real” version and a “staging” version.

WordPress uses the staging version when you migrate themes or redesign the site (I haven’t done either in 2+ years). But somehow, all my site stats and comments were on the staging version of the site.

Some comments did make it through on the staging version.

But comments on the real version (outandout.boardingarea.com) didn’t make it through. The BoardingArea team is working on combining both sets of comments into the current, real version of the site.

How long has this been going on?

The last comment on the “real” version of the site was in early January 2017. But I don’t know exactly when everything shifted to the staging version. Maybe a few weeks?

Why did this happen?

I literally have no idea. Everything was running smoothly until one day… it didn’t.

When you have a blog, there’s bound to be a technical glitch here and there.

I believe it had something to do with the original domain name (outandout.net) no longer forwarding the stats to the migrated version of the site. But who knows.

What I did to fix it

For starters, I deleted the staging version of the site altogether. And reconnected the real version of the site back to WordPress (which hosts the blog’s comments).

It was sorta painful because I lost all my stats since the beginning of the site… but I’d rather have communication open than not. And I still have my data from Google Analytics.

So now there is only one version of Out and Out – this one. That should prevent future glitches from happening, too.

I wanna talk

I feel terrible that I might’ve missed communication with any of my readers.

I just hope no one thinks they were ignored.

It’s incredibly difficult to cultivate a space where people feel comfortable talking. And having a roadblock like comment trouble makes people (obviously) give up – especially if they’re new.

I’m grateful a couple of readers reached out and said WTF? so I could look into the issue and get it fixed.

If you tried to comment recently, I’m sorry if anything fell through. And still welcome your questions, thoughts, tips, or anything else!

Please try again – it’s all working correctly now.

Bottom line

I’m grateful every day for the readers who follow along with the blog on RSS, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And I want to be as available as possible.

Comments are back now. Your comments have helped my own thought processes, philosophies, and travels. And I’m thankful for that.

Thanks again to all who helped me recognize and fix the issue.

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