For some reason which is currently unclear to me, the recent comments plugin isn’t accessing the contents database and thus nothing is appearing on the sidebar where it normally is. I can’t seem to access the comments database internally either! I’ve contacted our host with a request to sort this out, so please bear with us for a bit.
Update: They’re back! Did anyone else notice anything odd?
Update #2: Here’s what happened, or so I’m told:
The system “temporary space” area was unavailable to the MySQL database backend for a few minutes.
It seems that without access to this area MySQL cannot even reliably read from tables!
Yeah, MySQL will create temporary tables in its temp directory for some SELECT queries. It’s also used for quite a few other things so odd behavior would be expected should it go away or become unusable.
The practical upshot is that you may have outgrown your disk space allocation.
Thanks, Jacques. We’ll get that checked.