Cooler weather arrived here almost exactly at the same time as our fall holidays and the change in weather was a blessing all by itself. (I don’t do well in hot weather, having grown up in a place where it definitely is not hot most of the year.) We even had a few minutes of early morning light rain. It was wonderful to see, hear and smell it at the beginning of our brief winter, but we definitely need more, like just about every place.
During those final hot days of August and September I took the opportunity to review, refresh and update some of my more recent posts, as well as many of my very first, but still popular posts on this site to reflect the whirlwind changes that have taken place on WordPress.com. Not only did the content change in these posts, but, I styled the post content differently making it more readable for you. Yes, blocks were involved. Now you’ll find more images and illustrations and better definition of the post content.
You can find my refreshed posts here.
There be bugs!
All this extra activity helped uncover some strange bugs lurking in the works which were reported to WordPress.com.
Bug #1: Akismet vs. Discussion Settings
For about 2 weeks in September, the Akismet privacy statement on my site was added in a footer widget on each post and page, because I discovered that after I changed a setting in my site’s Discussion settings, both the Strictness and Privacy settings in the Jetpack>Akismet Anti-spam dashboard changed on their own to something else. Regardless of those settings, Akismet continued working and the Akismet folks rolled out a fix for this a few days ago.
Bug #2: Comments in the Image Carousel
The Gallery feature was launched in July 2008 and has gone through near continuous iterations since then. Most of us upload images to our WordPress.com site or post and add them to the Gallery Block or Gallery feature in the Classic Editor without thinking twice about what happens when linking to the image Carousel in Settings>Media. And that’s the way it should be.
However, perhaps at some point you uploaded images when comments were disabled on your site in Settings>Discussion. This Discussion setting carries over to the comment settings for those same uploaded images and effectively turns off commenting on that image. If you’ve enabled the Carousel’s comment area in Settings>Media, instead of a clear message that commenting is disabled on that image, after submitting a comment in the Carousel, this message appears:
Sorry, but there was an error posting your comment. Please try again later.
Given the history of images and the Gallery feature here on WordPress.com, moving from the idiosyncrasies of image Attachment pages to a much smoother experience for both us and our site visitor with the image Carousel, I had hoped that enabling the Carousel’s comment area in Settings>Media would override any media-specific comment setting. Apparently it doesn’t.
If you now want to allow comments on those images where commenting was disallowed, it entails going to the WP Admin Media Library and changing that media-specific comment setting for each individual image, since there is still no option to bulk edit image comments. The current Dev group think, however, is leaning towards adding a message that commenting on the image is disabled. Not my preference at all.
Bug #3: Shares and Likes in the Image Carousel
The other image Carousel bug uncovered is when both Likes and Shares are enabled for Media in Tools>Marketing>Sharing Buttons. Neither of these features show up in the image Carousel. It’s been reported, but I haven’t seen anything yet beyond my report.
Coming to a Block Pattern Library near you?
There’s a feature request in the works to bring the WordPress.org Block Pattern Library to your Block Editor’s Library of block patterns.
Frankly, there’s already a dizzying number of Block choices which, like Tribbles, keeps multiplying, but I might use less than half a dozen in a post. In order to keep things manageable, I pared down my block choices to the ones I regularly use. If this is something you’d also find helpful, check out my post below, which has been refreshed for 2021.
I mentioned the “whirlwind” changes happening on WordPress.com, so stay tuned. Next time: templates, themes and widgets.
As always, the information in this post is correct as of publication date. Changes are inevitable.
Featured photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
WPcomMaven 
I need to know where it’s “not hot for most of the year” … and also, how bad the winters are there.
Yup, contemplating relocation once again (only in the discussion stages) and we’re trying to avoid having two places. Ergo, we’re looking at places where the extremes (hot and cold) are no more than a couple of months each . . . so far, no luck.
I bookmarked that link and will peruse in my ‘down’ time.
Thanks for perusing. 🙂
Relocation, again? “Not hot most of the year” means the winters are long and snowy. I can no longer tolerate the cold, but also cannot tolerate the heat. I think it has to do with age (we are of an age). Good luck finding a place that fills the bill. My guess would be north-ish, near-ish an ocean, but not having lived near a coast in the US, I’m clueless.
Out West, where we lived (Monument, Colorado) fits that bill (with issues). Yes, the winters are long (in terms of the growing season; first snow in September, last snow in late May), but the predominance of sunny days (and high altitude) makes them relatively mild when compared with places with higher humidity (I rarely wore a heavy coat in the 11 years we lived there).
Of course, there are blizzards (intense blizzards) but rarely causing disruption (just don’t drive on the day of the blizzard). Because of the high altitude, Summer has very rare 100+ (F°) days and the fabled ‘dry’ heat really does make it bearable even in the 90s. Of course, that’s changing (meaning, more 90s and 100 F° days).
The big problems are:
1) congestion – lots of people are moving out there (it really is a nice place to live … except for …)
2) water . . . not sure what they’re gonna do, but the aquifers are draining fairly fast and the reservoirs usually run low (they depend on run-off from the snowpacks).
3) fires – the low humidity and drought conditions mean more fires (we lived through two major fires two years apart from each other).
Really, we could have lived there longer (and still been there without any bother), but we wanted to give Hawaii a try.
As for moving back . . . maybe Wyoming (not congested), but #2 and #3 still issues (plus, harsher winters).
Really, we’re also looking at how the areas are affected (and will be affected) by climate change since historical records are being up-ended on a regular basis. No perfect area, but I like the heat a lot less than the cold.
I’m laughing here. We’ve been a number of times through that area either on our way to or back from Denver and the Springs (and shopping at Castle Rock or visiting the Air Force Academy), but not since 2018, sadly. So I understand the fire and water issues. Like you said, those and other areas are getting hotter and drier. Don’t know, it might be easier to eliminate areas. Good luck in your search!
You lived in the Springs? We moved to Monument in 2005 . . . January. Cold, yes, but not bone- chilling cold like Michigan.
The Springs has milder winters than Monument (we lived right in the Palmer Divide, top of Monument Hill).
We didn’t live there, no, but we visited. Last trip was in 2018, when we did the National Parks. 🙂