NOT All My Loving – CommentLuv Deactivated

This post was supposed to be titled All My Loving and announce the adoption of the CommentLuv plugin. In combination with my very own KeywordLuv plugin, I would have indeed been giving you all my loving. Unfortunately, I had a problem with CommentLuv and have deactivated it. For now…

The Bad – Huge Increase In Database Size

I first noticed the problem when my daily database backup was emailed to me. The size had increased by almost 50% compared yesterday’s backup. I tracked the problem down to CommentLuv 0.999.

It seems there is occasionally a problem where each and every feed is stored in the wp_options table in the database. That means the entire feed (all 10 posts), of everyone who leaves a comment, is being stored in my database! Not only that, it stores the entire feed for each comment you leave. RT from Untwisted Vortex left 8 comments, so I have 8 copies of his entire feed.

In the last few days, 58 comments invoked CommentLuv. The wp_options table grew from 0.5MB to 3.5MB. I couldn’t let that continue, so I deactivated the plugin and manually cleared out the stored feeds (they aren’t needed).

When I went to Andy Bailey‘s site to report this, I found this is a known problem, which will be resolved in the next version. From his post discussing the upcoming CommentLuv upgrade:

** Currently, there are some cases of the default include of MAGPIE saving each and every feed cache to the WP database in WP_OPTIONS/OPTION_NAME which tends to make it grow quite large, also some users have reported it being set to “autoload on” which can have an effect on load times.

I wouldn’t expect this to affect many people, but if you’re worried it may be a good time to do a backup and see if its significantly larger than expected.

UPDATE: If you are affected, Andy has posted a way to clean the database.

The Good – Great New Features In Next Version

While at Andy’s site, I found that he is doing some really cool things with the next version of CommentLuv. These include:

1. ‘AJAX-ifying’ the plugin, so the commentator’s feed is parsed while they are writing the comment.
2. Removing the reliance on PHP and WordPress functions, so that potentially it can work on other blogging platforms such as Blogger.
3. My favourite: Adding a dropdown list of your last 5 posts, so you can choose which one you want CommentLuv to add to the comment.
4. And of course, resolving my problem!

Brilliant! You can try out a demo on Andy’s CommentLuv Ajax Preview post.

Final Thoughts

If you’re wondering why CommentLuv disappeared, that’s the story. I think CommentLuv is a great plugin and about to get better. I’m committed to running it on my site, but it will have to wait for the next version. In the meantime, at least you can get some KeywordLuv here.

Tags: Dofollow, Feeds, KeywordLuv, Wordpress Plugins