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You are here: Home / Development / When Good Plugins Go Bad – Comment Relish Considered Dangerous

When Good Plugins Go Bad – Comment Relish Considered Dangerous

posted on August 22, 2007

Recall I found out about an automatic commenter-thanking plugin I was very excited about?

It turns out that Dreamhost, my hosting company, were not quite as thrilled as I was.

Hello,

Please disable the plugin that is causing this query (otherwise I’ll have to disable your mysql table or user and I really don’t want to do that!):

# Query_time: 2 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 2045519
use chrisgcom;
SELECT c.*, p.*

FROM wp_comments c

INNER JOIN wp_posts p ON p.ID = c.comment_post_ID

LEFT JOIN wp_cr_emailed e ON e.email = c.comment_author_email

WHERE e.email IS NULL AND c.comment_approved = ‘1’;

===

It’s not efficient enough to be running on a shared hosting server and is contributing to high loads and poor mysql performance. Here is my direct email address for confirmation (and if you have any questions):

jxxx@dreamhost.com

Thanks!
Jxxx

While the message could have been a little more helpful and friendly (would a complete technical novice have been able to work out which plugin was causing the problem?), it seems the upshot is the plugin is not coded well enough for heavily populated shared hosting to be able to cope with.

A real shame as I just heard about a great tweak to the code allowing you to send a personalised message while still getting an automatic notification.

Just goes to show that not all plugins can be used.

How to install and trial plugins safely:

  • Check them out with friends and other users,
  • Google for any known problems,
  • Take a full backup of your blog and database
  • Try the plugin for a while, monitoring for any problems,
  • Contact the author to see if there is a known fix
  • and always remember what order you installed them in so you can identify and remove trouble makers.

I would contact the author but I don’t want to risk Dreamhost yanking my account by trying it again.

Have you ever had plugins misbehave? What do you do? Does this sort of thing put you off trying new plugins? Let me know in the comments …

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