errors when leaving comments

i found the text, but i don’t know what this means-

<?php
if (!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] == dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-comments.php’)
{
die (‘Error: This file cannot be used on its own.’);
}
/* Don’t remove these lines. */
$blog = 1;
require (‘wp-blog-header.php’);
add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘popuplinks’);
foreach ($posts as $post) { start_wp();
?>

Just left a comment with the pink blog as a test. No error. Also with Jons Blog. No error there, either. 🙁 Sorry, guys.

I’m seeing this error as well on the fiancee’s blog at http://www.believemagic.com/journal. I get the error in IE6 SP2 under Windows XP SP2 on two different PCs (one is an actual PC, the other is a Virtual PC under MacOS X). The fiancee also gets the error from work under Win2k in IE5.5 (she thinks that’s the IE version, anyway). And one of her users mentioned it to her, which is how we found out in the first place (unknown OS and browser).

Safari 1.2.4, FireFox 1.0, and IE 5.2 on the Mac exhibit no problems. Similarly, FireFox 1.1 on the PC has no problems. But every time I try to click on any comment link in IE6 in XP, I get the “error: file cannot be used on its own” message. This includes posts that already have a comment or two posted, FWIW.

Is there a recent update to IE for the PC that would cause pop-up comments to go AFU? A security setting, perhaps?

I’ll have access to a few more machines at the university tomorrow – I’ll see if I get the error from there as well.

Troy

I have been able to narrow this down a bit. I should say from the start that I know nothing of PHP and very little about HTML… but working from the code around the error message:

if (!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] == dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-comments.php’)

I figured that the referer request header might be involved here.

In Opera you can easily enable/disable sending that header. With the referer header enabled, I get no error message. With the header disabled, I get the error every time. Tested in Opera v8.0 on the Mac and v7.54 on Windows.

I’d love it if others could reproduce that result, just to make sure it’s nothing wacky on my end.

Using the steps outlined at http://codex.wordpress.org/Enable_Sending_Referrers however, does not eliminate the error in IE6 for Windows. The Windows machines are running XP SP2 and there’s no security software – even the Windows firewall is disabled.

Any ideas from the gurus? I can’t figure out how to enable sending the referer in IE.

Troy

I’m only seeing the issue when popup comments are enabled. With popup comments commented out, there’s no problem. That’s been the temporary fix for the fiancee’s blog (disable popup comments) since I can’t very well tell her users they must use Opera.

So what would happen if I just commented out these lines in wp-comments-popup.php:

if (!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] == dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-comments.php’)
{
die (‘Error: This file cannot be used on its own.’);
}

As I said before, I know precisely jack about PHP. What’s the purpose for these lines? Is using the referer header merely an anti-spam device, or does it serve a larger purpose? Is the error message really caused by the referer header being not present (or malformed somehow) or does it just look that way?

The same lines appear in wp-comments-post.php… would I have to remove them from there as well?

More to the point, will I be crushed by a huge foot (Monty Python animation-style) if I just sorta remove those lines and see what happens?

Troy

Has there been any movement on this? A definate cause / solution been found?

I’ve got a friend running WordPress 1.5 that I set up for him and he was just told by one of his site visitors that the error is coming up when this site visitor tried to comment.

The site is http://www.sticksoffire.com . He’s using pop-up comments….

I found that this error only occurs when I disable referrer logging on Opera 8.01

I hope this helps.