Garvin has been trying to trace a bug which results in this for some time, but I don't think he has had any luck.
Basically, I believe (from what little I have followed) there is a bug in the comment increment/decrement code somewhere which subtracts a number from the counter incorrectly, resulting in the number being "less than zero" (ignore handwaving there). Since the comment value is stored in an unsigned integer, the result is a really big number.
So, there are two things to say:
1) If you have any idea if comments were added to the post, and how they were then deleted it might be really useful to know!
2) To fix the problem it would probably be easiest to edit your database manually. The comment count is stored under the prefix_entries table of the database in the actual entry that has the problem. (prefix is what ever you set the prefix to when you installed... the default is serendipity. Ie; the table would be called serendipity_entries.)
If you can run a query on the database you can run something like this:
Code: Select all
SELECT * FROM serendipity_entries WHERE comments=4294967295
If that returns what you expect you can do something like this to fix it:
Code: Select all
UPDATE serendipity_entries SET comments=0 WHERE comments=4294967295
But any information about the number of comments which might have been added and removed, and how they might have been removed would be useful!