This is a guest post by Udegbunam Chukwudi of StrictlyOnlineBiz
God knows how many times I’ve got the wordpress blank page error after leaving comments on some blogs. Some days back I got an email from one of my readers complaining that he had left two lengthy comments on my blog only to get a blank page after clicking the submit button. Thus I set out to find a solution and finally I’m 99% sure I’ve found one.
My research revealed that in some cases the almighty and over-rated Akismet is to be blamed. One of the features of Akismet that helps it with it’s anti-spam capability is that it tends to monitor the time gap between when a web page or blog post loads and when a comment is subsequently submitted.
If the time gap is small, Akismet tags the comment as spam and either throws up a blank page or tags the comment as spam in your wordpress dashboard. In most cases it does both.
HOW TO FIX THIS ISSUE?
Simple, deactivate and uninstall Akismet.
Please note that I tried this method and the next day, my blog went loco with the permalinks misbehaving badly. Single posts kept throwing up 404 errors. Reactivating Akismet and restoring a backup of my database seems to have saved my blog.
NOTE: I don’t know what Akismet had to do with this but I’m so NEVER going to be deactivating it again because at a point I felt I’d been hacked.
If you intend going this route, make sure comment moderation is enabled for each and every comment. Most especially if you manage a do-follow blog like I do.
Another fix I found making the rounds on the net is changing a little piece of code found in the comments.php file of your wordpress theme.
It is said that wordpress uses post ID to track which comments go with certain posts and if this post id is missing in a comment, the comment is lost or the commentator is redirected to a blank page.
The Trick:
Using CTRL + F, find:
<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="<?php echo $id; ?>" />
in your comments.php file and change it to
<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="<?php echo $post->ID; ?>" />
Save the file and you’re good to go…
NOTE: So far so good, by changing this tiny piece of code in the comments.php file, I’ve been able to save my commentators a whole lot of headache. Deactivating Akismet was certainly not an option for me.
I hope you will find this guide helpful whenever your blog will face such kind of problem.
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Blog commenting has been a major part of my SEO and I’ve had the blank comments page so many times. It never occurred to me it was Askimet related. Thanks for the info.
Hi Udegbunam,
You are very clever in detecting the problems regarding Akismet white page blacklisting method. So it means If we do comment on let’ say 5 to 10 blogs in a very short interval we will be see this white page? I hope I get your idea right.
Vinson
I had the same problem just recently and I had to reinstall my theme. That solved my problem:-)
Exactly what I was looking for – I’ve had this blank page so many times and thought it was just me. Many thanks, Rob.
Thanks. I have been very active lately in commenting on blogs and this has been a problem. There is nothing more frustrating than writing a lengthy comment relevant to the article and discussion and end up on a blank page.
I initially thought it was my computer but after several tries I realized it was askimet. I hope they clean up their act, they are damaging web 2.0
John
Now I know why sometime when I make a comment (to some other blogs), after submitting a long paragraph comment… blank page? Urrrggghhhh…(-_-*)… so thanks for this very useful post. Hopefully, those kind of blog site (which I submitted with long paragraph comment and redirected to a blank page) will read this so they can fix the problem.
It really doesn’t happen to me but I’m just curious still to find something for it.
Very helful info, it fixed my wordpress issues.
That’s why I sometimes get the blank page after commenting. I thought it was my browser’s problem. Turns out it is Akismet.
I don’t understand as well when the comments take me to a blank page, so you mean the comment was never even read by the blog owner? That sucks very bad, why would Akismet place a tag on people like that? This is like branding people as spammers! Even when they are not, so we are not allowed to comment on blog posts anymore? I don’t understand Akismet at all, but I know many people don’t like it.