A couple of months ago (maybe more, even), it was pointed out to me that the gallery comments were broken. And sure enough, they were. People could still post comments, but when the site tried to display them, a PHP error was spat up instead.

So why wasn't it fixed then? Because it isn't quite that simple. For those who want more background info, read on... and those who don't, skip the next paragraph.

So the code base for this site is sizable. And not well organized, as basically this site has been created by hacking new features on to existing code, with the occasional rewrite. And, as such, it's completely custom code, so I can't go running off to Google to try and search for a solution. Throw in some undescriptive PHP errors, and it can be difficult to fix issues. In this case, the only error I got was that it was a regex failure in the template engine. And many, many things can cause that error. Long story short, because I had put a single "=" in a comparison instead of "==" elsewhere, things were breaking when a specific keyword was being hit in the template... and the only spot where that normally comes up is in the gallery comments (for note, it would have come up in news comments as well, but since no one has left a comment, the bug went unnoticed).

In any event, it's now been fixed and the comments are working again. And also made me realize that the comments system might have some deficiencies (lack of read states, for example... you can't see when someone has added a new comment to an image), which I plan on starting to work on it the coming weeks.