Update 3:38pm PST: The magic Hmm fairy has changed the lump of coal described below to joyful tidings thanks to the surprisingly speedy, dilligent repair and communication by Matt and Chad from the Yahoo Development team. Much appreciated and may both you gentlemen have happy holidays. Also hope much fruitful feedback awaits you in the new year and beyond.

Between now and Christmas I’m handing out lumps of coal (boo, hiss) and joyful stockings tidings (good, merry) for certain encounters, events and errata online that make me — and hopefully some/most/all of you — go hmm.

First up on the coal front is for the Yahoo Developer area official blog using an apparently broken commenting system. Not broken for a few minutes, hours or days, but weeks. You’d think a major website’s developer area official blog would have technical things in order, wouldn’t you? Nah, it’s like your mechanic buddy’s car.

The screenshot at the top of this page shows my attempt to submit a comment for Matt on his seven minute screencast released yesterday detailing some of the upcoming del.icio.us API features. The screenshot below shows the error message received.

The last comments it appears anybody was able to leave on the Yahoo developer blog was on November 6, over six weeks ago. Go ahead and try to leave Matt a comment there and see if you have better luck than me. I asked a friend in IRC to try from another part of the country and he received the same error message. Doh!

Maybe Matt’s blog where he crossposted the screencast would be a better location for leaving feedback? Perhaps a link in the Yahoo Developer blog feedback section indicating, hey our feedback section really doesn’t allow any feedback, so try this place instead?

The error message is humorous though and made me smile, thank you, Yahoo.

Another similar problem is sites that use incomprehensible CAPTCHA. I’ve visited many blogs and websites where the comment CAPTCHA is completely unreadable by machine and human. In fact, I pointed to Yahoo doing this two years ago.

The moral of this holiday cheer gone jeer is if you are going to have a feedback section, make sure it actually works.

If you don’t receive comments from others for awhile, maybe that’s because when they tried to leave them for you … they couldn’t.

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• Yahoo Search API now available
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• Treat yourself to Hmm Halloween 2006 comment contest and could win $6.66 USD
• Akismet first catch a false positive
• Mullenweg on Comment spam