The comment system suddenly stopped working
Today I got an email from MongoDB saying one of my databases had not been connected to since October 15, and that it would be suspended after 60 days of inactivity.
After following the link in the email, I realized it was the MongoDB instance used by this site’s comment system. A quick check confirmed the comments were indeed down. Opening F12 showed repeated 206 errors when trying to connect to Hugging Face, and the Hugging Face Space itself stayed stuck on “Preparing.” I’m not sure what changed on Hugging Face’s side, but the existing setup was clearly no longer usable.
Switching the serverless platform
I went back to the Twikoo documentation and found that Netlify has the same recommendation level as Hugging Face. Since Hugging Face was no longer working, switching to Netlify was the most straightforward option.
While checking the docs, I also discovered something else: when I was using Hugging Face before, email notifications for new comments had never worked. It turns out that limitation came from the serverless platform itself. After moving to Netlify, that feature is supported too.
So I followed Twikoo’s Netlify deployment guide and got the comment system running again.
At that point, new comments were working—but all the old comments had disappeared.
Why the old comments vanished
That sent me back into the Twikoo documentation again, where I finally noticed the key detail: Twikoo connects to a database named test by default.
My previous MongoDB setup, however, had apparently followed the example shown in the Twikoo docs at the time, and I had created a database called twikoo instead of test.
So the issue was not that the historical comments were gone. Twikoo was simply connecting to the wrong database.
Fixing the database connection
The next question was how to tell Twikoo which database to use instead of letting it fall back to test.
The solution is to specify the database name directly in the MongoDB connection string.
For example, the environment variable in Netlify had originally been set like this:
mongodb+srv://alon:<password>@cluster0.sjwbezq.mongodb.net/?retryWrites=true&w=majority&appName=Cluster0
It needed to be changed to this:
mongodb+srv://alon:<password>@cluster0.sjwbezq.mongodb.net/twikoo?retryWrites=true&w=majority&appName=Cluster0
After updating the MongoDB environment variable in Netlify and redeploying, everything worked as expected. The old comments came back, and email notifications for new comments started working too.
Goodbye, Hugging Face.