I noticed recently that people commenting on this site were not leaving their names. That is not so unusual except that there were so many anonymous comments.
I decided to look into it to see if I could see why. I am always logged into my blog admin site so when I browse to a blog post, I don’t need to fill out the Name, Email, etc. So to see what others see when they browse to a post on this site, I browsed to it in a browser I don’t normally use (Camino in this case).
However, when I browsed to one of my posts in Camino, it appeared I was logged in to my admin section – the following message was in place of the normal fields – “Logged in as . Logout”. In my normal browser (Firefox) when I am logged in, I usually see the message “Logged in as Tom. Logout” so it appeared to me that there was a WordPress User with a blank username somehow.
I checked the Users section of my Admin interface and sure enough the blank user was there – not sure how it got there, possibly created in the upgrade from 1.5 to 1.5.1.
I deleted the user, and thankfully when I refreshed the view of the post, I was now presented with the familiar fields for comments. Now it will be easier for people who want me to contact them back to leave their details – apologies for any inconvenience.
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Tom: I’m having a simlar problem to yours but it doesn’t follow all the symptoms you laid out. I just converted a Tyepapd blog to WP. I got my first comment today on the wp blog and all the ID boxes were empty except IP.
So I posted to the Support forum & someone pointed me to your post. But my problem is that I don’t see the logged in Logout button as you do. Here’s what I wrote in reply in the forum:
Before I start I should say that I’ve left a comment today on my blog & all of my data appears in the proper ID boxes. But as you said all of the external commenter’s ID boxes are empty.
I used IE (instead of my normal Firefox) to access both the blog & admin panel. I don’t see anything like “logged in as . Logout.” I see “Logout Administrator” (if we’re both talking about the admin panel). I see the same thing when using FF.
When I view the user list as Tom Rafferty suggests I don’t see two users (which he says is the cause of the problem). I only see myself in line 1. THere is a line 2 with nothing filled in except a few numbers like so:
2 – 1 + 278 Edit
A note: when I click on Comments in order to leave a comment, I see the following error:
“WordPress database error: [Table 'richard2_wp.wp152_exhibit' doesn't exist]
SELECT ID FROM wp152_exhibit WHERE post_ID = 770 and preview = 1 ORDER BY picorder;”
I don’t know whether this has anything to do with my problem or not. The error is prob. due to the fact that Carthik has been helping me to convert my blog from typepad to WP and there are prob. some db conversion issues still to be ironed out.
Richard,
you can’t see the Logged in as . because you are already logged in as Administrator. If you go to the Admin Panel and Logout or use a browser you haven’t logged in with you will see the Logged in as . problem (I just did it on your blog.
You need to Edit line two in your list of users to add a name and password – this should sort your problem,
Hope this helps – let me know how you get on,
Tom
After posting this comment I discovered the nature of my problem. I do have a user 2 listed to which 250 posts are associated. Those posts now have no author. This must’ve happened by accident when Carthik was importing my typepad posts into my new wp blog. Is there an easy way to get those 250 posts associated with user 1 (me) instead of user 2? If I merely give user 2 a name & password will that solve the problem? Could I give user 2 the exact same name & password as user 1?
Richard,
It would be possible using sql to associate those posts with user 1 but it might be easier to simply name user 2 as Typepad or something similar so you know in the future that those posts were made before you migrated to WP
It wouldn’t be a good idea to try to give the user the same name and password as your user 1
Cheers,
Tom
I’ve just added data for user 2. Could you try to leave me another comment & see what happens.
Also, does it matter what user level user 2 has? Now it’s 1.
Thanks.
Thanks for the solution! It solved my problem!
Great,
glad to have been of help,
Tom
So simple and yet I couldn’t figure it out by myself :/ Anyway, thanks for sharing the solution!
Now I need to change the author on 633 posts – looks like I have to work on the database …
I like wordpress alot,as it provides many features and it is simple.
But, the permalinks problem is something I wonder why the developers can not solve.
I got into a similar situation when I installed an RSS to blog script (WPMI). However I do not use it, just tried. But an empty name syndrom occured.
Janos
Thanks for a solution, hope this would work.
AH im glad i found this. i was having simular thought. thats that cleared up then. good work guys
Thank you it worked fine for me. Thanks for sharing this info Tom.
Thanks, you really helped solved my problem.
Sam