The good news is that bloggers have hounded the editors and the system will be changing shortly to hopefully improve the community aspects of the blogs

And not just blogs! IMHO almost all content-driven websites would benefit from a simple commenting system on almost every page. OpenID is obviously the weopen of choice for logging in, but anonymous posting can still play an important part.

As an example, I accidentally ended up on a MSM webshite following what looked to be a link to an interesting tech article the other day. We all know how the MSM has completely missed the point online, so I won’t list all my greviences, but suffice to say that after clicking through the 6 ‘pages’ of the article (urgh!), I thought I’d do my bit for the community and their readers and correct a technical misunderstanding in the text.

They had NO comment system! The author name wasn’t a mailto, and at that point I gave up. Their loss, and more importantly their reader’s loss.

Digital divide, anyone?

Could we get a comment RSS feed from jkontherun? I would love that, it would make my week (at least).

James – I agree that putting your comments somewhere else could be an issue if they were ever to go belly up. But, just like your blog (hosted at TypePad), you want to back all that stuff up, right? TypePad could (theoretically) go away.

Having anything “in the cloud” means having a good backup strategy. Disqus easily allows you to export comments – I would just automate that.

In the end, I see too many advantages to using a system like Disqus than disadvantages. If some users do NOT want to log in, they don’t have to – they can post without an account just like they do today. But adding Disqus doesn’t harm them – it helps everyone else. I _like_ being able to see my comments for all sites that use Disqus and getting email replies and threading of responses and all of the neat features. I guess I’m just saying that you may want to give it a second look. MUCH bigger blogs than yours use Disqus, believe it or not. Even FakeSteve was running on it, and many other well-known sites as well.

You’d be able to import your comments, people can even “claim” their previous posts, and other neat features. Keener Living just enabled Disqus and he has a post on it that may be worth reading: http://www.keenerliving.com/2008/08/21/disqus-commenting-enabled-at-keener-living/

Thanks for your reply, by the way… I appreciate it.

I personally don’t mind registering at a site I intend to use regularly, especially if, like some of my favorites, they can automatically sign me in via cookie so I don’t have to mess with logging in once I’ve signed up. And don’t spam me, either.

I agree that the height of rudeness is the site where I have to “audition” to be good enough to post there. What a Life. . .cough, cough, strangling thing! I will never, never post there. And half of their comments from approved commenters are absolutely dumb. Go figure!

I just checked out openid because I liked the idea of it. One password. There is not one single site I go to that uses it! Good idea, unusable for me.

I’m just trying to see if this comment loads. I thought the blog subject quite ironic after I have failed many times to get a comment loaded on JK on the run. It shows as posted OK then disappears never to be seen again. Well maybe this one will work using a different email.

I largely don’t comment in places that aren’t pretty much anonymous, and don’t tend to want to make all that much effort to ensure privacy, so no registration but a capcha is about at the limits of my invasiveness-tolerance.

We have looked at Disqus before but there’s one significant thing that scares the heck out of us. Once you go Disqus your entire comment system including all comments are on their system, not the blog. Should they ever go out of business, and these things happen, your blog comments are all gone at once. We have over 30,000 comments here so imagine if in a year or two they all just disappeared.

I agree with olly. Disqus is a great commenting system to use. It’s easy to integrate and gives you more of a community identity. You register once and use that all over the place (including being able to claim previously posted comments based on email address). Since you have an account, if you are a spammer, the site admin can block you. Lots of negative “karma” about your account also helps mark you as a spammer. I would be interested in seeing what James thinks about this and give it a try…

I agree with you James and wanted to publicly state that I am sorry our ZDNet blog system is currently setup for registration. The good news is that ALL of us ZDNet bloggers have hounded the editors and the system will be changing shortly to hopefully improve the community aspects of the blogs. I prefer simply systems like what you have here and as you can see on my blog there are very few comments on most posts and I think most of the reason is because of the Talkback system (hopefully it isn’t my writing).

The good thing (for the most part) is that we don’t hold comments in queue or anything so they are not reviewed by anyone before they get posted. People slam me all the time in the comments and the comments stay up for all to read.

No, even worse than that, is the way some sites want you to register and then they’ll take a look at what you posted to see if it’s “cool” enough for you to get a membership and be able to comment in the future.

Then you read the comments of those “they” deemed “cool” enough and you scratch your head. Purely juevenille.

I’m not going to name those blogs, but the system is in place at a few of the big ones.

Thankfully, not JKOTR!

@Genghis Khent 09:56AM

Give this a read for why some CAPTCHAs may not be as legible as you’d expect:
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

I agree with you James. And I also avoid the blog unless I really want/intend to post routinely.

I’ve also noticed that some blogs, when you register, have pre-checked boxes so they can send you email. Ba-a-a-a-a-ad!

Woadan