Does anyone know what's going on here?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Unrelated comment: over the last ten or twenty entries in your journal, I'm seeing a disturbing frequency (low, but nonzero) of comments from regular posters that are just totally blank. A few with 'edited at' italic lines, but most not. Posters that I do not recall having a history of posting blank comments.

For example, on this post they are, in order:
realinterrobang's second followup to martianmooncrab's comment
kithrup's followup to neowolf2's comment
realinterrobang's followup to xiphias' comment, and to jhetley's comment
beamjockey's comment (so it's not just followups to comments)

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

If you click on "Read 36 Comments" many of them do show up, but there are a lot of empty ones. I randomly picked a few other of James' posts from that week and didn't see anything similar happening on those. Very strange.

ETA: Found another post from Sept 20th where it happens:

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4580538.html#comments (David Wilford, pixel39 and thesaucernews all have blank replies)

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

And another from the 20th:

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4580643.html#comments (kithrup's comment)

Still have not found another example that isn't from Sept 20th.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Does this coincide with a DDoS attack on LJ?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

might be, it seems to only affects comments between 08:30 and 08:49 on the 20th.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. Looking at Twitter, there is a brief mention of one on the 23rd, and the LJ maintenance boards mention one on the 9th. Nothing for the 20th that I can find.

ETA: I went back after reading Fridgepunk's comment, and they're right. On this post:

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4580538.html#comments

the earliest missing comment is 8:19, next earliest 8:20 with an "edited on" comment showing it was edited at the same time it was originally written.