An Administrative Announcement

After much grief and frustration and bitching and moaning, I've finally done it. I've finally given my old commenting system the boot.

The thing is, Enetation seemed like a good choice way back when. I signed up for it when comment systems on blogs were a new thing and available only from independent providers like Enetation... most of whom were utterly swamped with demand for their services and had severely limited signups to the point where they were practically impossible to get into. Enetation had no such restrictions, and it offered some nice features, especially if you paid the $14 "pro user" fee. It looked like a great bet. Sadly, its service got crappier and crappier as time went on... The comment counter became unreliable to the point where I'd frequently needed to go to their website and run a program that would force it to update. Then it quit working without intervention altogether. As of today, even running the program wasn't working any more, and that, my friends, was the proverbial last straw. Because this is on top of a gazillion other problems, including: not updating the comment window after people hit "post," thus leaving them to wonder if their comment had gotten through; comments occasionally not getting through; fairly frequent error messages which might or might not indicate that the comment hadn't actually posted; not letting me see the comments at all while I was actually logged into my user account, thus rendering useless all the nifty features only logged-in users have access to (and meaning I had to keep logging in and logging out again when I did need to fix things); and a complete and total lack of technical support. The forums, which is where support requests were supposed to be made, were hacked into a while back, and instead of being fixed, they were simply removed. Not that it mattered, as there had been no official presence on them for the last year or so, anyway, and posts there requesting help were simply ignored.

So, yeah, Enetation is gone. History. Good frickin' riddance. The sad thing, however, is that this means that every comment that's been made on this blog since its inception is now gone. I'm not happy about this; it's the main reason I was resisting making a changeover for so long. And I do apologize to everyone who ever commented here for consigning your responses to oblivion. But, man, it had to be done.

In place of the old system, I've activated Blogger's own commenting system. For those of you who have Blogger accounts, it should use your information automatically. The rest of you can still leave comments by posting as "anonymous" (do please sign your names, though, so I know who you are!). Comments will still open in a popup window, so you'll need to make sure you have popups enabled for this site. Feel free to comment on this post to test it out, and do please let me know if you encounter any problems. I think I've got everything set up correctly, but I'm not 100% sure. Oh, and for the moment, I've got verification turned off, which means you won't have to type in random letters to prove you're a human being. I find those things incredibly annoying, but I'm afraid that if I start getting major amounts of spam I might very well have to turn it on. We'll see how it goes.

I'm also probably going to be playing around with my template just a little bit more today, so if you stop by and things look strange, wait a few minutes and refresh, and hopefully I'll have fixed whatever boneheaded thing I've just done.