Loss Of Comments After Publishing Blog To A New URL

Recently, we've started to see a number of reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken of comments being lost after a blog is newly published to a Google Custom Domain - or in some cases, to a different Blog*Spot URL. Like many problems involving comments, custom domain problems, and / or URL changes in general, this problem warrants further investigation.

To start with, there are a few questions which are relevant, which may help us diagnose where the problem originates.

• Blogger Support suggests two useful details.
  1. The exact URL of a post on your old blog which has comments.
  2. The exact URL of a post on your new blog which is missing comments.
• Where are the comments being lost - can you find them still inventoried in "Edit Posts", for instance?
• Were the comments moderated, or unmoderated?
• When were the comments posted (by the blog readers)? When were they approved (if moderated) by you?
• Is the blog owned (and moderated) by you only, or is it a team effort?
• From how many different browsers and / or computers have you observed the comments lost?
  • Your computer / your readers computers?
  • Any affinity as to browser or computer operating system?
  • Does your blog have any cultural, geographical, or linguistic relevance?
  • Do you observe this problem with just this one blog, or with other blogs too?
• What type of comment display does your blog use - Embedded, Popup Window, or Separate Page?
• Did you buy the domain through Blogger ("Buy A Domain"), or directly from a registrar? If directly from a registrar, did you use a righteous DNS setup?
• When you observe the lost comments, is the blog "In Transition", or does this happen after Transition ends? Or is this a simple blog rename, to another BlogSpot URL?

This is just a beginning effort, to diagnose the problem. Help us out here, and maybe help yourself.

• Answer the above questions, either in your forum question, or as a comment below.
• Subscribe to the comments feed for this post.
• Check this post occasionally for more questions, and answer more questions when asked.

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(Update 2010/05/20): In a private note from Blogger Support, we are told

Comments should usually sync within 24 hours of the time when you changed your URL, most of the time much sooner.

(Update 2010/05/06): We have an update from Blogger Support.

We released a fix on May 1st which should prevent pretty much any 'my comments havent synced after a few days' issues.' So for any person reporting the change after May 1st, it should be a matter of hours. If we see cases where its longer, please let me know!

Note if you change the blog back to the previous URL, you'll just make things worse. That puts the comments through two URL changes. If you change the URL yet again, when you find out that changing the URL back didn't accomplish anything, you're going to have to wait still longer.

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Help us to help you, and provide details. Please.

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