Comments are back

Well, I finally did it. I dumped the IntenseDebate comments widget.

It was a hard decision, for several reasons. Worst of which was losing full nine years of reader comments.

As I always say, my intrepid half-dozen readers make up in quality what they lack in quantity. As a result, there was almost a decade of thoughtful, supportive, and informative participation locked up in that abandonware, that couldn't be transferred to any other host. Dumping IDC meant losing all of that.

But keeping it meant many couldn't comment in the first place; in some environments there wasn't even a "Comments" link available. And finding a back door was fiddly and time consuming, when it was possible at all. The glitch dogged me as often as readers, who had been gently complaining about it for some time.

The lesson here is, never use a third-party feature for content. Off-site upgrades are inevitably deserted by their inventors, leaving their users recourse-free. So only use host-native resources for core services.

There were a few other issues. Worst was that I'd lost the ability to delete spam or abuse. Fortunately neither have been a problem on Rusty Ring, but this is still the Internet. It was just a matter of time.

Not that IDC was short of attractions, of course. Most notably it allowed readers to edit their comments. No matter how vigilantly you copyedit, the instant you post that paragraph all manner of typos and missteps bob to the surface. Therefore you need the power to fix it afterward. But sadly, Blogger's crude comment interface, with its attendant lack of up-thumb (they can keep the down-) and ugly typeface, robs readers even of the ability to delete a comment, let alone change it.

In other words, it's worse than Twitter.

And "worse than Twitter" is grounds to dump anything.

But I'll tell you what that rock-knocking Internet v.2 Blogger comment utility does allow you to do: it lets you comment at all, which IDC, for all its elegance and convenience, was no longer doing. And since it's built in to Blogger, it's unlikely to simply go numb one day, unless the entire platform does.

The good news is that I immediately heard from readers who had been chafing at the inability to continue our conversations – and a few new ones who had never been able to start one in the first place. In less than a week I've racked up more comments than I've had at any week in the recent past.

So welcome back, friends! If it hadn't been for that lost material I'd've done this a long time ago. My deepest apologies to those whose contributions got poofed into the ether at a stroke of my keyboard. (Make that several; hoovering out all of the IDC code and troubleshooting the result took the better part of an evening.) I look forward to seeing you once again in Rusty Ring's new/old bindle-technology comments.

(And for those wondering, yes, I'm still planning to move this blog to an entirely new host. It's just that I've got too much going on at the moment, what with my mom's in-home hospice and a few other things, to take it on yet.)


(Photo of a reader comment scratched in Robert Burns's Commonplace Book 1783 – 1785 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)