Is that ok? Will you still feel the love? Because I've felt the love this week. It's been the most commented-on week since I started this blog! Thanks, friends!
Hey, we're about 500 pageviews short of 10,000! I am soooo super excited. I have the perfect way to celebrate too -- it involves you and a gift card giveaway...but we'll all have to wait until 10,000 pageviews. Follow along on the right sidebar! We're not cheating because the counter doesn't count my own pageviews ;).
This may be a heavy post for Friday afternoon, but it's been on my mind for a while!
On to my rants on commenting systems…
1. Blogger
So I've been struggling with Blogger's commenting system for a while. I asked Blogger twice if a "reply" to a comment on my blog, would a response be sent to the commenter. I want to show publicly that I respond to each comment, but I also don't want to respond once on the blog and then again via email or other means. I got no answer from Blogger, so I tested it out myself.
click images to enlarge
The answer is "no", I did not get a response.
As a reader, how are you supposed to know if someone (either the blogger or another reader) responds to your comment?
Well, you have to subscribe to comments. But guess what, if you click on the "Subscribe by email" link on this blog, you get notifications whenever anyone posts a comment, not just someone replying to your comment.
Personally, if you spent the time to post a comment, I'm going to spend the time to reply to you. But I don't reply on the blog, because you'd never see it, unless you came back to the same post. And are you really going to track every comment you've ever made on every blog? I didn't think so.
Not just for this blog, but for most other blogs using the default commenting system, why can't I/you just subscribe to follow-up comments to my/your comment? Who wants to be inundated with notifications, especially if the blog you commented on has like hundreds of people making comments? Ok, maybe you do.
But then again, you might not care. You just want to leave a comment and be gone. If this is you, please let me know so that I don't bother you.
2. Other default commenting systems
I'm only going to speak to the commenting systems I've encountered, which are on WordPress and TypePad blogs.
On WordPress blogs I've commented on, I've had to fill in a form with my name, email address, and website. On TypePad blogs I've commented on, I could choose from various accounts -- I seem to always use Twitter. I'm assuming that WordPress and TypePad bloggers may have to "activate" or add the subscribe-to-comments feature because I haven't seen a link at the bottom of these blogs.
On any blog, you use the RSS feature built-in to your browser to subscribe to comments (be sure to click to comment form first). But again, that's all comments. Here's an example using Firefox.
3. Disqus
I've determined that no default commenting system is going to do what I want it to do, so I'm making the switch back to Disqus (please be patient as Disqus is importing all of your previous comments!). It seems more improved since the last time I used it. Plus, I see a lot of other sites using it.
The best part about it is that if I create a Disqus account and remember to post with my Disqus account on other blog using Disqus (still following me?), Disqus aggregates all the comments I've made into one place. Here are the 3 most recent comments I've made:
At the top, I can click "Replies to you" and see if someone replied to me without reading everyone's comments.
Soooooooooooo niiiiiiice.
So, I've made the switch to Disqus. (Please be patient as Disqus is importing all of your previous comments!) There's still an option to subscribe to comments (all of them, I suppose) even with the switch.
Let me know what you think!
Have a recommendation for another commenting system?
P.S. I was not compensated by Disqusor anyone else to write this post ;).
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