Monday, May 29, 2006

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.

17 comments:

  1. Testing... Testing... One, two, three!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, I think so, too. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow, blindingly shiny tech!

    Nico

    ReplyDelete
  4. Or a least much less broken. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. [Mark] Say something
    [Joanne] What?
    [Mark] Anything!
    [Joanne] Check one two three
    [Mark] ...anything but THAT.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sibilance... sibilance... turn up the 4k...

    ReplyDelete
  7. If you're reading this, then the new ciommenting system works for me.

    In Choose an Identity, the Blogger and Anonymous options are self-explanatory, but what does Other do?

    John Hall

    ReplyDelete
  8. I wasn't sure about that one, myself, but I checked the documentation, and according to the website, "other" lets you "enter your name and a link to your website, without having to have a Blogger account." Which means you needn't be anonymous at all, I suppose. :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ah, I must try that.

    ReplyDelete
  10. That's better, though I don't like its insistence on converting names to all lower case.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Nothing I can do about that, I'm afraid. They do show up with caps on the individual post pages (what you get when you click on the permalink), at least.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Awwwwww, why not Haloscan?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Because Halosscan might crap out on me, too, for all I know, but if Blogger goes out of business, I'm kind of screwed, anyway. :)

    ReplyDelete
  14. I gotta tell ya, I am soooooo happy with Haloscan. While I was on vacation last week, some jackass tried to spam my comments but by the time I could look into it, Haloscan had already recognized the problem without me reporting anything and removed all the spam! How's that for service? I can ban individuals from commenting, edit comments, all kinds of things. And if someone does try to spam (someone else tried last night), I just click a single button and they are reported as spammers and the comment is removed. Also, they remember your identity for when you go to comment again so you don't have to fill out all the identity stuff each time. Yay Haloscan!

    ReplyDelete
  15. The fact that they actually removed your spam for you sounds really cool. I would call that service above and beyond (as long as they don't get too aggressive and start removing legitimate comments by mistake!). All the rest of that stuff, though, enetation used to do as well, before it fell apart.

    At this point, I think I'd rather have a plain-vanilla system that I'm certain I can rely on that one with lots of nice features which I don't trust. Not that I'm saying haloscan isn't trustworthy, but, man, I got badly burned, and I have no desire to take any chance of going through that again. I'm not gonna lose all my comments twice.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.