technical announcement: comments broken

Greetings esteemed readers. It has been brought to my attention this morning that the babbage.tv comment system appears to be broken. Even on the first attempt to post a comment the system initiates flood controls, and tells the commenter that they must wait a short while before posting a comment. This is broken behaviour.

I'm not sure how long it has been doing this. The last comment I received was two days ago, a piece of comment spam I've since deleted. However, I do know that my hosting provider was upgrading the version of PHP they are running to 4.3.10 overnight, something that probably directly effects the comment system on this MT 2.661 blog. So I'm wondering...

In the meantime, feel free to email instead! dblog at babbage dot tv...

This has been a technical service announcement, authorised by Kermit the Frog. Thank you for your attention.

Update: I've just found that on the other blog I host in the MT installation, timandmegan.babbage.tv, comments seem to be working fine. Now I'm really stumped.

Final update: A google search eventually led to this blog entry at The Zero Boss, which isolated the problem as being due to running two MT blogs here—this one and timandmegan.babbage.tv—set to two different timezones. Basically, it meant that any time you left a comment on Tim and Megan's blog, as I did last night, you couldn't leave one here for the next 13 hours (the timezone difference) and 60 seconds (the usual delay before being allowed to leave another comment). I got some further leads here at Twisted Spinster (beware: profanity) including comments from Jay Allen himself, which finally led me to this most excellent post at phil ringnalda dot com that provided the solution. So there you go. More than you ever wanted to know. And we're all un-broke now. At least as far as this goes.