This Site Has A New Commenting System from Bikes in the Fast Lane

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This Site Has A New Commenting System

February
2012

  File under System
  Author: Mike Werner
  Location: Normandy, France

I do not seem to have much luck with commenting systems for this site. Since the site was created many years ago, I have had 4 such systems. The last one I installed was hopefully my last, since I thought it would never disappear, since it was Google Friend Connect. It was far from perfect, but at least I had some control over it. But as with many Google products, they decided to terminate the service, so I have been looking for a new system.

Unfortunately, all previous comments are lost, since Google does not offer anyway of exporting all comments per article and import it into a new system.

What's Important
What important for a commenting system is the ability for people to post comments, and read them. Posting should be, if so desired, anonymous, or named. If it's named, logging in should be very easy, preferably using IDs from other parts of the web (like Facebook, or Twitter).

Also very important, if not crucial, is the ability to moderate, and to make sure you the readers are not pestered with the 100's of SPAM links I receive per month.

So, after a long search and comparison, I have decided to use the popular DISQUS

commenting system. It's not yet perfect, but I have been assured it's getting there.

How To Use DISQUS
One of the downsides of DISQUS is that comments are not visible in the Front Page (the page that has the last 7 articles). Instead, at the bottom of each article, on the right, you'll see "x comments", with x being the number of comments received. Clicking on the "x comments", will load that article, and bring you straight to the comments.

DISQUS have assured me that they are working on the ability to show comments in the index page (front page).

Logging On To Comments
If you plan to use your identity for your comments (which I strongly recommend, since at least I know who I am dealing with), you can log on using one of many popular social site's ids:

DISQUS Id
Facebook
Twitter
Google Id
Yahoo Id
OpenId

Not only will you be able to log on easily using one of these Ids, and it will be remembered (so no need to always have to log on), but if things go right, your avatar defined by your id will be shown.

Moderating
Unfortunately, the world we live in is filled with idiots that SPAM the living hell out of us. Some are professionals who try to sell you any sort of snake oil, some are sites who hope to get people to come to their site by posting links to their site.

So, none of your comments will be shown immediately! They will need to be approved by me, so it can take some time for them to appear (especially when I am sleeping).

There is a "whitelist" ability, meaning I can tell DISQUS that this person can be trusted (this only works for users who log on), which I plan to start using later on. Once you are whitelisted, your comments should appear immediately.

Links
Unless a link posted in a comment is 100% pertinent to the article, if will be deleted.

iPhone version
I plan later on this weekend to switch the same commenting system on for the iPhone version of this site. That will mean that comments made on one site can be seen on the other.

So... what do you think of the new commenting system???? Let me know, I'm dying to know.