I opened a help-desk ticket with my blog host (TypePad) just now. Normally, I wouldn't publicize it, but the specific problem is intriguingly humorous. It's exactly the sort of computer error that an itinerant epistemologist such as myself deserves. Here's the ticket as currently stands (slightly redacted). I'll post updates on this blog post – I'm betting something vaguely Kafkaesque will unfold – but who knows?
On Nov 28, 2010 10:37 AM, you (caveatdumptruck) said:
A friend of mine tried to post a comment to my blog, and says he received the error message "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". This is a pretty weird error message. Is Typepad doing semantic analysis of comments to determine philosophical viability? I hope not.
I trust that my friend isn't making this up.
Can you please tell me if your code, somewhere, is programmed to output such an error message? If so, could you please explain what sort of context such an uninformative error message might be acceptable? Or alternately, recognize some kind of easter egg or deny the existence of such program code?
Thank you
~jared
NOTA
Here is a copy, pasted after the "======", of my facebook conversation with my friend, in which he told me about the error. It also summarizes some steps I took to try to replicate the problem.
=======
Tony – hi Jared, tried to post a response on your blog and received the message, "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". Sadly, I wasted a half hour on it 🙁
o
Jared Way –
Damn! I hate that kind of thing. I will try to investigate: my best guess – the blog host has some kind of length-limitation on comments, and doesn't have a very user-friendly response to overly long ones.
I will also post your comment to… my blog host's help forum. That's a very strange wording for an error message – did it really say "cannot accept your idea"? How does it know what your idea was? Definitely weird.
o
Tony – Yes, that was the message. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news
o
Jared Way –
Argh. Well, I think I ruled out the "length-limitation" idea – I posted a cut-n-paste of a 20 page article as a test comment and it went thru fine.
I tried making mistakes with the "captcha" and that didn't give that error, either.
I will see if my blog host has anything to say. Not optimistic, however.
o
Jared Way – One more error test: I pasted a vast document of nonsense and URLs (simulated spam) into a comment box. No complaint – with the correct catcha, it didn't error out. The blog host simply ignored the whole thing. Typical "black hole" database consistency error.
[update: received below from the TypePad help desk. makes sense]
Thanks for the note. We do not censor comments in this manner.
The error was more than likely instead “We’re sorry, we cannot accept this data.”
Usually when this error happens, it’s because they’ve left the comment box open for a long time and the session times out, causing the comment to be rejected. We would just suggest that they try leaving the comment again, making sure that the page hasn’t been left open for a long time.
I hope this helps. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.
Thanks,
Kymberlie