Techcrunch just deleted all comments older than 1/24/2010 | Hacker News Reader

2010

blog.styleguidance.com

33 pointsvaksel20 comments

So many new opportunities for 'First'...

And suddenly the sum-total of intelligence on the Internet increases.

Next stop: Digg and Reddit.

And youtube.

+1. (Youtube is amusing because the same topics come up every 10 comments or so. That, of course, is how many comments fit on the first page.)

Actually, I appreciate having the comments available on TC - so that perceptive readers can occasionally take them down a peg or two.

I am seeing this too. Check out the scamville post from last October:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-ga...

Just one comment from this week.

It's premature to say that it's related to the TC hacking incident. Could be some other glitch. But I do hope the old comments are restored -- there are usually some interesting viewpoints or additional details in those old threads.

Some articles say they have lots of comments, but then, don't:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/why-is-dell-really-disc...

Others, like ilamont's link, have the counter reset:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-ga...

Sounds like a cache at work. I know for a fact that WP's caching does not do anything intelligent to determine if it is invalid. Post a comment, and code is run to invalidate the cache. But delete a comment from the database, and it will just be served from cache.

I tried adding a comment to one of those posts and it didn't work.

Check again - I see a comment by you on the first one.

My guess then is that the DB isn't actually purged, but is currently not displaying entries dated before the 24th.

Or is this a new, quieter-but-more-pernicious hack of their db?

Seems more likely than that they would hack themselves.

Maybe it's an attempt to flush their database (and pages) of the various spam people have left all over it.

Really? They could have dropped records with site and twitter URLs for starters.

Was there any follow-up to how TC was hacked?

There's been no update to their original post, but the comments are still there: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/26/techcrunch-hacked/

I hope the comments from the first TechCrunch 'Twttr' posts are cached somewhere.

No one could get passed how to pronounce it. "Twitter or Twatter?"

Anyone else think the Scamville companies paid for the TC hit?

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiFire

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