Posted by & filed under Developer Blog.

For a minute, I thought my comments were not working or were being blocked on this site. I could post one comment, but anything after that didn’t work. I spent most of the morning trying to figure out why it was happening and thinking I’d broken something while tweaking my theme or something. I also wondered if it was some type of built in spam protection that I didn’t know about.

Then, as I was browsing through the Mephisto Wiki I stumbled upon the answer. The problem was stemming from the fact that I’m running Mephisto on Apache. According to the wiki entry I found, it’s because Apache likes to add a trailing slash (/) to anything without an extension (stuff that follows the dot “.” in a filename) thinking that it must be a directory. Rails urls (and therefore Mephisto urls) use Pretty Urls instead of extensions and the like.

Apparently, however Mephisto is handling comments is being cached weird in Apache because of it. The easiest, and highly effective, solution is to plug the following in your public/.htaccess file somewhere (I put it at the bottom):
DirectorySlash Off
Since it took me 4 hours to find that post with the answer, I thought I’d post it here as well and hopefully those looking for a solution can find it in one of the two places quicker.