Comment Preview – Help Please!

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Edit: Thanks everyone for the feedback, most helpful. Please see comment #20 for my conclusions.

It was reported earlier in today’s Guardian post that the ‘Preview Comment’ button had stopped working.

When I checked, I found that this was in fact the case. As indicated in my reply on that post, I suspected the problem was due to an incompatibility between a plug-in that hadn’t been updated for five years and the latest version of WordPress which was installed last week.

This seemed to be confirmed when I visited my sandbox replica of the site. WordPress hadn’t been updated there and the ‘Preview Comment’ button was working correctly. After I updated WordPress to the latest version the button appeared to do nothing.

Subsequent comments in the Guardian post indicated that some visitors have been able to preview a comment after the WordPress update so I investigated further in the sandbox. My findings were that the ‘Preview Comment’ button did not work when I was browsing using IE11, but when I changed to Chrome it did, so the problem would appear to be browser specific.

Now my problem is determining whether the WordPress update last week or the IE11 update the week before is the cause of the problem. I have tried changing various security settings in IE11 but this has made no difference.

To assist in tracking down the cause, it would be very useful to get some feedback as to whether the ‘Preview Comment’ button works for you and which browser you were using at the time. Any further suggestions would also be welcome because the only alternative ‘comment preview’ plug-in that is currently available does not appear to work with the theme the site uses (though I’ve yet to try it with Chrome).

21 comments on “Comment Preview – Help Please!”

  4. I also have IE8 (not updated as I never use it) – the preview worked on that, though I didn’t actually post.

  9. After all that – it works fine for me in Chrome (v.42) and Firefox (v.35), but not IE 11 – no preview appears. (All under Windows 7 Professional.)

  14. Windows 8/ IE 11. Preview Comment button is shown; turns blue when clicked on but no preview appears.

    Couple of days ago the button did not appear.

  18. Has anybody tried changing the Compatibility View settings in IE11? If not I’ll have a play with that at home this evening. I use Firefox at home most of the time because other sites (e.g. Yahoo Mail) have problems with IE11 on Windows 8.1

  19. I have just tried beery’s suggestion (comment #18) on IE 11 (on Windows 7 Pro).
    First, “Preview Comment” wasn’t working – button goes blue, and the spacing between “Preview” button and “Please complete …” message increases.
    I put ‘www.fifteensquared.net’ in the “Compatability View settings” list (via the “Tools” menu)
    Then it works as expected.
    The page looks a bit different but not too bad, for instance the “Preview Comment” button has moved to the right.
    Anyway I’mm sticking to Chrome

  20. Thanks everyone for the feedback. It would appear that the problem is restricted to IE, with other browsers being unaffected. The cause seems to be due to both the WordPress update last week and the IE update issued by Microsoft on 14/4/15. My reasoning for this is:

    WordPress 4.1 + updated IE – preview comment works
    WordPress 4.2 + updated IE – preview comment does not work
    WordPress 4.2 + IE without update – preview comment works

    From my research, there are several other issues regarding the latest IE update so I hope that when Microsoft resolve these this problem will also be rectified. In the meantime, the only realistic solution would be to use the ‘compatabilty view’ option as suggested by beery hiker and confirmed by beermagnet (thanks both).

  21. Thanks the beery ones @18 & 19 – it works, even if the Preview button moves to the right! I did change to Chrome at one stage but found some problem with it (I can’t remember what!) so switched back to IE11.

    My money is on the IE11 update – there’s normally problems after that!

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