Over the last few months I tried several commenting systems with this blog. I’m not satisfied with any of them. I tried Discus (a replacement comment system), and the standard WordPress comment system both with and without various plugins to add functionality. I got complaints about Discus that it was too hard to leave a comment. I agreed. Upon doing some internet research I found that this complaint was by far the most common one.
I also got complaints with the standard WordPress comment system in that sometimes the comment would appear under another commenter’s name until the browser’s refresh button was clicked. That’s no good. Also, in order to have what I consider to be the most basic functionality such as the ability to reply to individual comments and have those replies be nested under the original, plugins had to be used. This increased the risk of interference among the plugins.
The latest one I tried, JS-Kit Echo, I installed last week. Unfortunately I’ve been out of town since then and have not had a chance to evaluate it very well. There are other bloggers that use JS-Kit, chief among them is Joe from Joe.My.God. It appears to be a good system considering the high volume of comments he receives daily, sometimes approaching one thousand.
The folks at JS-Kit released a fancy new version of the system called “Echo” a few weeks ago and I decided to try it out. It does almost everything I want it to, and commenters can even login to it using their Google Blogger credentials. I tried it myself on various browsers and it works (except for one problem with Opera 10.0 and I am working with them to get a fix for that). I noticed that BentonQuest also uses this comment system. I think I need to have a conversation with him directly to see how he likes it.
One thing JS-Kit Echo does not yet do is allow the commenter to go back into his comment and edit it. I frequently need to do this when I leave comments on others’ blogs. I’m highly prone to misspellings and other simple errors. Sometimes I delete my comments and try again. It’s a bother. I’d like to see an “edit” function to save you folks from similar aggravation. Interestingly, the JS-Kit Support webpage uses Echo and it has the desired “Edit” function. I hope they are merely testing out a new function and will roll it out to the public soon.
May I ask you to leave me a little comment and let me know if you like this new system and if you had any problems with it. If there were problems, please also let me know your OS and browser. Thanks for helping me with this.
