The bane of the existence of anyone charged with supporting digital systems is receiving incomplete bug reports (“that thing on that page is busted!”)

Fortunately, I have bred a digitally literate son, so when something’s broken on ruk.ca, I not only hear about it, but I hear about it with clarity.

Witness the email I received 5 minutes ago:

Subject: Problem Commenting on ruk.ca

There’s a problem commenting on ruk.ca (there’s no email address)

Oliver included a helpful screen shot showing the lack of email address on the comment form:

And, sure enough, when I checked the post in question, there was no email address on the comment form (in technical terms, for the Drupal content type “sound,” the “Anonymous commenters must leave their contact information” setting wasn’t selected).

The result was that although commenters could comment, checking the “notify me when new comments are posted” checkbox was rendered moot because there was no way to enter an email address.

I’ve fixed this, and Oliver’s been able to comment as he would like.

This familial bug reporting helpfulness is obviously genetic, as my mother pointed out last week that there was no facility for comments at all on Oliver’s blog. We fixed that yesterday by enabling comments in his Drupal (along with Mollom to mitigate against comment spam).