Comments not working after WP 4.9 update and Newspaper 8.2

Hi guys,
I’ve noticed something peculiar on the comments section. When visitors come to the site and leave comments, they do not appear in my dashboard as waiting for approval (I manually approve all comments). However, when I leave a comment when I’m logged in as the site admin, the comment appears. I found this recent post from a few days ago on the WP-dot-org site and they found it to be a theme issue: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/comments-seem-to-have-stopped-working/

1. yes comments are turned on everywhere they can be turned on (Settings>>discussion and on the post)
2. I’ve turned off Akismet and Captcha temporarily (problem still there)

I’ve been using Newspaper for a year or two with no issues re: posting comments, so this is new and all of a sudden since I upgraded to Newspaper 8.2 and WordPress 4.9.

Would welcome any tips or suggestions. Thanks in advance. Love your work.

Kind regards 😉

Thanks Bogdan,
I am aware that admin comments are automatically approved, but I tested this on a different browser and put in sample dummy comments. They did not appear in the comment moderation. They just never showed up.

I also observed that after leaving a comment as a user (not logged in as admin) that it does not say “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”

I also noticed today that a spammer was able to get a trackback to appear in my spam folder. So somehow trackbacks are working but not comments.

I’ll experiment with other themes and also use Plugin Organizer to turn off different plugins on a post and see if I can narrow it down.

There’s definitely something wrong, but it will just take some deeper detective work to figure it out. I’ll report back as this might help others who could experience the same issue.

Cheers

• This reply was modified 8 years by MESOTU.

Hi Bogdan
And anyone else who might care, I have isolated the issue and it appears to have come down to a caching plugin.

I use WP Rocket cache. I disabled it then went to three different browsers where I was not logged in. I left a few dummy comments from different names and it worked.

I reactivated WP Rocket cache and then refreshed those pages on those browsers and left new comments. Oddly, it decided to work.

I’m not sure I understand why, but at least in my case, disabling caching and then reactivating it seemed to work (scratching my head).

Cheers 😉