If the blog seems like it’s been acting a bit strange the last couple days, that’s because it was. Warning: Long rant begins below.

I’ve had my site hosted by Globat for a couple years now. My biggest complaints about the company was that it sends me these sneaky automatic upgrade offers that you have to opt out of. Aside from that and a relatively few outages, I was generally satisfied with them. A month or so ago, they notified me that they are now under new management and that they will be migrating my site to a new platform.

That migration happened Sunday night/Monday morning, and since then, it looks like every plugin on my blog that requires an outgoing connection has stopped working. Most notably, Akismet simply stopped catching spam comments. I checked my Akismet configuration panel and saw the following message:

The key below was previously validated but a connection to akismet.com can not be established at this time. Please check your server configuration.

When I re-input my API key, I got this message:

The key you entered could not be verified because a connection to akismet.com could not be established. Please check your server configuration.

In addition, my Wordpress Stats stopped displaying results in the Top Posts, Top Searches, and Most Active fields in the dashboard, and not coincidentally, the widget that displays the most popular posts in my sidebar, which draws its data from Wordpress Stats, was now empty. Furthermore, my Del.icio.us widget is now giving me a “no bookmarks available” message.

So I did some Googling on the Akismet problem, and everything I found pretty much said the same thing:

Check your host allows Akismet to use port 80.
Also check that they allow Akismet to connect to rest.akismet.com.

So I filed a tech support ticket with Globat around midday Monday, explained my problem, and gave them a link to the Wordpress.org forum thread above that addresses the issue. They wrote back that evening with:

Akismet feature is supported on our platform. While you download the Akismet plug-in from the WordPress Web site, they will provide you with API key. You have to make sure that you have entered the API key while installing and activating the Akismet plug-in in the plugins menu inside of WordPress Administrative Panel.

Umm, ok. Thanks, but that doesn’t really address my problem. So I wrote back, explained the issue again, and provided a screenshot of the error message I was getting in the Akismet configuration panel, as well as an excerpt from Akismet’s Web site on the issue, which basically says, again, to check that the hosting server allows outgoing connections.

Globat responded with:

Thank you for getting back with us.

We have not blocked the API keys. It will work on our platform. If the API key is not working, you need to contact your vendor of the WordPress application. Once you enter the API key the Akismet plug-in is activating in your WordPress.

Now it’s starting to feel like I’m talking to a wall here. Besides, I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the problem doesn’t lie with the Akismet plugin itself. After all, if Akismet just broke, I think more than a few blogs would have been affected by this and there would some Internet chatter about it. Of course there wasn’t. Besides, the issues with the other plugins requiring outgoing connections, as well as the fact that this problem occurred right after a platform migration, seem to corroborate my suspicion that it’s an issue with a server setting.

Deciding that exchanging e-mails just wasn’t cutting it, I hopped on Globat’s live chat yesterday to sort out this mess. I explained the problems again to a tech support agent, and the first response I got was:

We have not blocked the API keys. It will work on our platform. If the API key is not working, you need to contact your vendor of the WordPress application. Once you enter the API key the Akismet plug-in is activating in your WordPress.

Wow. Thanks for copying and pasting the exact same answer I got the night before. Do you guys have a database of stock replies that you just turn to for particular issues? At this point, I was getting pretty grouchy, and I’m generally not the type to berate some poor soul in tech support or customer service. In this case, however, I was getting very annoyed by the fact that nobody seems to actually be reading/listening to what I’m trying to tell them. At the end of the chat session, the agent reopened the ticket so that a “specialist” would look at it.

So I check the ticket history a bit later in the day, and I saw this update:

John Zhu contacted us saying that he is unable to view the WordPress blog www.john-zhu.com/blog/ . He use Akismet to catch spam comments on the blog. He told: ‘I notice that after the migration, the Akismet plugin is no longer able to connect to Akismet.com, which cripples its ability to catch new spam. Upon searching the Wordpress support forums, I’ve found the following: “Check your host allows Akismet to use port 80.
Also check that they allow Akismet to connect to rest.akismet.com ” . Do we support Akismet plugin? Please assist the customer.

Of course, I had said nothing about not being able to view my blog. Great listening skills there, Globat tech support. So I added an update to the ticket to correct that and explain, yet again, what exactly my problem was.

So around 9:30 p.m. last night, I noticed that I was getting an “error connecting to database” message when I tried to access my blog. I figured that’s a sign that Globat is looking at the issue. Ok, fine, no problem. A couple hours later, I saw that the connection had been re-established, but it was pointing to the wrong database. Instead of pointing to the database for this blog, it was pointed at the database for a test site that I use to try out new features before implementing them on the blog (so if you visited my blog around 11:30 p.m. last night, this is why things looked messed up). I thought that perhaps it was part of their diagnostic process and that they were still working on it. So I just left it alone overnight.

This morning, I received this e-mail from a Globat tech support agent:

I’m sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused you.
I have corrected connection string in ‘wp-config.php’ file under /blog directory and it works. Please check the website now at ‘http://www.john-zhu.com/blog/’

I checked, and of course, the blog was still pointed at the wrong database. So I went in and fixed the path in the wp-config.php file to bring the blog back up. After that, I logged in to see if any of the problems had been fixed. Not surprisingly, they have not. In addition, I had lost one blog post I made yesterday, and the post I made on Monday, about the Goathouse Cat Refuge, had reverted to a draft version. In short, it looks like they simply restored my site to what it was on Monday.

So now, I am pretty incensed. It’s not even because Globat tech support can’t fix the problem, but that they seem to not even be listening. Or if they are listening, they are obviously having ridiculous comprehension issues, otherwise it won’t take three days for them to understand what the problem is. Or if they do comprehend what I’m trying to tell them, then they are either unable or unwilling to fix the issue and are simply giving me the runaround. Of course, neither of those possibilities reflect well on a company.

Hey, I know just about every tech company outsources its tech support and customer service overseas these days, but good god, at least find some competent people overseas, and don’t jerk your customer around.

As for the blog, I’ve got it back up and running for now, with the cat refuge post restored (yesterday’s post isn’t worth restoring). I found a substitute for Akismet, and as for the other plugins that require outgoing connections, I can live without them for now while I find a new hosting service. Globat, you’ve reaped what you sowed. I can tolerate your sneaky automatic upgrade offers and occasional brief downtime, but not the sheer ineptitude your tech support has displayed.