I regret to verify that this website has recently lost some comments. This has recently been brought to my attention by three readers. After hearing from several of you, I scrolled through the comments chronologically. On most days, we receive about 10 comments. For August 25, I seen no comments. August 25 was one of the two consecutive days that we took down the server for an hour to upgrade our hosting capacity; this is a somewhat complicated procedure.  I suspect that something went wrong during that process, though I am not positive. I think that I lost two or three of my own comments.

Working with the host, I pulled up a recent image and walked through the 250 comments so far in August. That particular backup image exactly matched what I already have.  I am trying to determine whether there is an alternative backup that might still have those comments.

I apologize for this distraction. If you submitted any comment that you don’t currently see on the site, and you have your own personal backup, please re-post it and I will make certain that I approve it promptly. Only one other time in the 4 1/2 years this site has been up have we dropped comments (that time we lost a handful, less than 10). I’ll do my best to maintain a trustworthy site, one where you can depend on all of your comments always being available (I have no intent on removing comments, ever). And we have a lot of comments annotating our posts, approximately 20,000 since the creation of this site.

Again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

[Happy Addendum – Josh Timmons (who runs the server) ran another search and he has found 24 missing comments and trackbacks, including comments by Brynn, Samantha, Mark, John Swenson and me (8 of the comments were authored by me).  I will set aside some time today to put them up where they were].

[More good news: I have now hand-copied all of the comments back where they were before we switched servers a couple days ago. Thanks for your patience. If you spot anything further out of the ordinary, please do write me and I’ll make sure any problem is corrected quickly.]