Ladies and gentlemen, we need your help and patience. Since the comments in Blogger were getting hard to follow, with the lack of a threaded comments option and all, we have switched to Disqus. However, this means that all the old comments have temporarily disappeared. They are being imported into Disqus as we speak and it might take a while for them to be back (the worst case scenario: a couple of days).
In the meantime, please try the new commenting system and tell us what you think.
- Are the comments easier to follow this way?
- Are you okay with the new login options (i.e. email required)?
- Have you encountered any problems trying to comment (page loading slowly/not responding etc)?
I often had problems with thw comments... I had to press preview every time in order to be fairly sure that my comment would not just be eaten... so if this new discuss option can solve this, then that's fine.
ReplyDeleteAlso if this option makes it easier to know when new comments are added to the topics that you commented... it was a bit difficult based with just the newest comments being shown in the sidebar.
In short... as of now I am in a positive mood about this shift to discuss... but well let's see how it turns out in the longer run.. :)
The only problem I can see is that you cannot use your own google/blogger acount to post with... but since I also have a yahoo account it is not the biggest of problems
ReplyDeleteI didn't know people had serious troubles with the old commenting system. I was just bugged by the small window, the fact that you had to use html to include links, and the lack of threads. And occasionally Blogger would duplicate comments. But yeah, if your comments were simply eaten away, then this makes me even happier we switched.
ReplyDeleteAs for the recent comments option, we will look into getting another gadget for the sidebar. We chose this one b/c it looked the best/didn't disrupt the sidebar too much, but the maximum number of comments for it is 5. There are others that are messier but go up to 20/30 comments, so I am thinking we will go for one of those, or see if Disqus offers one.
Thanks for commenting, Merovia! It helps to know what other problems we have to fix.
I think the only significant problems so far are those related to the login option. Basically, the completely anon option where you just filled in your name is gone. But it's really a shame that you can't use the Blogger account option here. I will try to post this reply with my gmail and see if it works.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea if you need to login every time. With the Disqus account that we have, it seemed to sign us in here automatically if we were logged into Disqus, so perhaps that works for yahoo as well? We'll just have to try and see.
I can use my google e-mail (ie. blogger linked e-mail) but even though I am already logged into blogger i still need to write email and a name instead of it just using my blogger identity... well... I'll stick to Yahoo for now... however I think I need to click to accept that this submission is made via the yahoo account every time...
ReplyDeleteiso testing... 1 2 3. It's a brave new world here at the blog! :)
ReplyDeleteIt's going to take a bit to get used to xD I'm so used to the old format, but I'll figure this one out! Luckily I have googlemail because of blogger :)
ReplyDeleteThat Disqus button at the top doesn't work....I tried doing facebook connect. Also, the comment loading is a bit lagging...whereas with the other system it didn't seem so slow. Is there a character limit with this system? Because I know there was on the old one, and that was a pain in the behind.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we have the same problem, but we're hoping the advantages will eventually make it worth the trouble. I also discovered there is no maximum length of post here, which makes me very happy. In the old comments (that I pray will be back soon) there was this infamous moment when I had to split a comment in two, b/c I ran on way over Blogger's character limit.
ReplyDeleteI know about the comment loading. It seems to be this way on all the blogs I've seen with disqus. But then again, for me Blogger took just as long.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Facebook button, it's my fault it doesn't work. You have to activate it first for people to be able to use it. And to do that, the moderator (i.e. me) has to verify their Facebook account by entering their mobile phone number/bank account. I'll do that, eventually.
Okay, so now you can use use your Facebook accounts as well. I activated that option. In order to make this easier for people who want to log in to comment, I added all the buttons for logging in (that you can still find by pressing Post as) at the top of the comment form as well. If you want to comment as guests, just press Post as and enter your screen name and email.
ReplyDeleteIt will be great to be able to follow all the new comments added. The improvements sound like they are worth the temporary inconveniences! Well done blog mistress Bugsie!
ReplyDeleteWhat are you all talking about? Lace! Muslin! Tell me what to do I will spiral into depression!!!
ReplyDeleteOh, that's quite simple really.
ReplyDeleteOh, don't spiral into depression yet. Don't know if you got to read my comment for your last post before all the comments disappeared into the Disqus machine. So I will sum it up here. I liked the fashion plate, and I had 2 fragments about mourning to share (since mourning was discussed in the comments to that post as well):
ReplyDeleteThe first is from Godey's 1871 and suggests that perhaps the Americans were more conservative in the mourning issue than English people (which makes sense considering they were and are more conservative in religious matters, for example):
"To return to black gloves for a moment, I must here remark that abroad, where rules respecting mourning are much more strict than in England, black kid gloves are not allowed during the first stage of mourning."
The second one is from The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, Fashion and Manual of Politeness by Florence Hartley which first appeared in 1860 and was revised and republished throughout the period of GWTW and beyond. It suggests matters were less clear and well defined for the Victorians than we thought:
"MOURNING There is such a variety of opinion upon the subject of mourning, that it is extremely difficult to lay down any general rules upon the subject. Some wear very close black for a long period, for a distant relative; whilst others will wear dressy mourning for a short time in a case of death in the immediate family. There is no rule either for the depth of mourning, or the time when it may be laid aside, and I must confine my remarks to the different degrees of mourning."
So no lace and no muslin, but hey, kid gloves and mourning must do :)
Oh, Iris, glad you like it. I am working on adding a widget with 20 recent comments to the sidebar, but so far it's proving tricky.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it too, Iris! We're working on getting everything updated to make it run as smoothly as possible.
ReplyDeleteOkay, so for everyone who wanted to see more comments: check it out. At the very bottom of our sidebar you can find 15 recent comments. I don't think we will get far over this number on a regular day, so if you visit regularly, this will probably cover the comments you haven't read.
ReplyDeleteI do encourage everyone to subscribe to comments for posts they are particularly interested in/to which they comment.
How do you get a picture on there? I feel like a ghost, just a silhouette! I won't plunge into my thoughts on your above comment just yet, but find it interesting as always. The second quote, from the Manual of Politeness, was that published in England or America? And yes, at that time America was probably the most conservative Western country, much more so than England. It's only in modern times that England is considered stuffy and conservative (though if you've been there you'd know it's not the case!)
ReplyDeleteI'm writing gibberish to see if this goes through. Sometimes Disqus works for me - sometimes not. :-)
ReplyDeleteIntense Debate works in Blogger, too, in case this causes any issues...
That is all! :-)
Bonjour!
ReplyDeleteMM- the picture question was one of my very first questions too. If you create a disqus account (you need to just create a username and provide an email), you will be able to set up a picture in there. And that image will display in place of your ghostly silhouette. :)
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried out all of the other posting features (yahoo, facebook, etc), but my guess is if you have a picture established on those accounts, it will populate onto the blog as well. Hope this helps. Maybe some of our other commenters have picked up tips that they can share?
Well, you have two alternatives. I will suppose you don't want to use your public Facebook profile, so I will go with suggestions that preserve your pseudonymity.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest is Gravatar: http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/ I think you only need to provide your email and then you would have a picture that you can use whenever you comment using that email, either here or on other sites.
The second one is Disqus itself. You can create a profile as a simple user and you can have a picture there (and claim all of your old messages, so they will display a picture too, I think).
Oh, I am happy it works! And yeah, we're hoping we won't have to switch again, but Intense Debate is a solution.
ReplyDeleteBonjour, monsieur!
ReplyDeleteThe avatar that comes up with my handle is one I chose on Gravatar for use at another site. It just came up when I signed up for the Disqus account.
ReplyDeleteLink to gravatar: http://en.gravatar.com/
Hmm. I'm still trying to figure it out. I don't understand why I can't use my blogger account to login with. I don't want to use yahoo because I think it would use my real name and not my screen name. Help! I do want to login with something so everyone knows it's me and not some imposter.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about yahoo showing your real name. I deleted that comment, so don't worry.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest way to have a screen name and an icon would be to create an account on disqus. Here's the link: http://disqus.com/profile/. It only takes a second. You need to provide an email address, that won't show up.
I am really sorry about this system not allowing Blogger users to log in.
Thank you! You're a gem. Now I just need to find a GWTW-related picture for an avatar...
ReplyDeleteIf anyone's interested, here are some of the html tags you can use in this commenting system (many of which were not available in the old one). They all require their brackets and a closing tag:
ReplyDeleteb - bold text
i-italics
u - underline
big- makes your text bigger
small - makes your text smaller
blockquote-to mark longer quotations
s - strike text
strike - strike text
sub - subscript
sup - superscript
A whole new world of fun opens for me if I am allowed to strike text :D
What are you all talking about? Lace! Muslin! Tell me what to do I will spiral into depression!!!
ReplyDeleteIt will be great to be able to follow all the new comments added. The improvements sound like they are worth the temporary inconveniences! Well done blog mistress Bugsie!
ReplyDelete