I have our site set up to only allow logged in users to post comments. All of our older posts show a block prompting for a logged out user to log in to comment but our recent posts just show a spinning wheel instead of that prompt. I’m just checking to see if anyone else sees that before I start digging into our theme.
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I’m also seeing the spinning behavior today. Haven’t had a chance to look into it, but I wonder if there’s a bug in there somewhere??
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HI @Cathy_Sarisky and @Ray1
I dug into this on a test site (Ghost 6.59, comments-ui ~1.6, comments set to members only) and found something that may explain it: the comments app lazy-loads. It doesn’t request anything from the server until the comments section scrolls into view, and until then it shows the spinner.
On my site, a logged-out visitor sees the spinner indefinitely if they stay at the top of a long post (zero comment requests in the Network tab). As soon as you scroll down to the comments, it loads the “sign up / sign in” prompt within a second or two. Short posts look fine because the comments are already on screen when the page loads, which could be why your older posts behave differently.
So a quick test: open an affected post logged out, scroll all the way to the comments and wait a couple of seconds.
- If the prompt appears, it’s just lazy loading — nothing to fix.
- If it keeps spinning while it’s on screen, that’s a real problem. Check the browser console (F12) for errors, and check whether your theme puts the
{{comments}}block inside a hidden or collapsed container. The app only starts when it’s actually visible, so a hidden container will keep it spinning forever.
Give it a try and let me know what you see, if it still spins with the comments on screen, share the console output and we’ll dig further. Cheers!
It seems like it might only happen if there are no comments in the post.
A second (unrelay) issue we’re seeing is that analytics seem to have stopped working.
Thanks Ray. I tried that on my test site (Ghost 6.59, comments for all members, a post with zero comments, logged out): after scrolling down, the sign-up prompt shows normally, so I can’t reproduce it here. Which Ghost version are you on, and are you on Ghost(Pro) or self-hosted? If it still spins with the comment section on screen, the browser console (F12) should show the error.
On analytics: if you’re self-hosted, Ghost 6 web analytics needs Tinybird configured, so I’d check that first. Might be worth its own thread.
I’ve seen similar behavior with comment forms where the login prompt works on older posts but the newer ones get stuck loading. I’d check the browser console for a JavaScript error first, then test with plugins disabled or a default theme. That should help show whether it’s the theme or something added recently.