For about two months PDD has been having problems with its “Recent Comments” feature — the menu item that highlights which posts have new comments you might not have read.

This week we installed a new plugin for Recent Comments that we hoped would be better, but unfortunately it isn’t.

The old version tended to work perfectly for people who were logged in and had their browsers set to accept cookies galore. For everyone else, which would be a vast majority, it worked poorly.

The new version works the same for everybody — as far as we can tell — but it works poorly for everybody. The two problems with the new version are:

1) It won’t tell you specifically that there are comments you haven’t read, it just lists the posts that have most recently been commented on, whether you’ve read the comments or not.

2) For some reason, if there is a new comment to a post that isn’t one of the 60 most recently posted items, the Recent Comments list won’t highlight it.

Issue #1 is just the way this plugin works, and we accepted that as maybe the best we can do for now, but issue #2 was unexpected, majorly sucks, and makes us think we’ll go back to the previous junky plugin if we can’t fix this issue.

So there you go. We just wanted to let you know why things are stupid right now.