Dear Blogger: I’ve Bumped Off Your Crappy Commenting System

I hated to do it, but it doesn’t deserve to live. I would have done it much earlier and replaced it with HaloScan had it not been for the fact that switching means losing all the lovely comments people have left over the entire history of this blog. So now they’re all gone. Wah! Don’t think that means I don’t appreciate every, single comment that everyone has ever taken the time to write. I do--so much! I have all the e-mailed versions enshrined in a folder in my e-mail application. Hopefully, the transition to HaloScan won’t be a problem for anyone. I’m sure most of you are familiar with it already, and plenty of people think it is vastly superior to the highly flawed Blogger system. Shall I list those Blogger flaws? I believe I shall:

• Sometimes it takes close to a minute for the ding-dong commenting box to open up. Annoying!
• People who don’t have Blogger blogs have to bear the stigma of being identified as “Anonymous.” Elitist!
• Sometimes it takes 8-12 hours for a comment to show up on my blog and/or in my e-mail in-box. Irksome!
• In the past few weeks, the system has decided to only e-mail me about half of the comments left on my blog, so I have spend time scrolling through the entries to detect new comments. Irritating!
• When I write Blogger Support to inform them of these glaring flaws, they first patronizingly suggest that the answer is in the Blogger Knowledge hope chest. Why not look there? Of course, I already looked there. I’m not an imbecile! Then I have to resubmit the problem and wait another five days only to have them tell me that there were a few “bugs,” but they’re resolved now. I got an e-mail like that today. But today was the day when the commenting system actually broke down completely--comments did not show up on the blog or in my in-box. What’s the point of having a commenting system if it’s not going to work? I mean, it’s so basic.* Infuriating!

Of course, there’s no real incentive for Blogger to iron out the problems with their commenting system. I’m guessing most people with Blogger accounts (like myself) have the free account. How does Blogger even make money? And do those of us with free accounts really have the right to complain? Probably not (but that doesn’t stop me!), especially given the fact that, with the exception of the noisome commenting system, I’m quite happy with the service.

Anyway, sorry for the administrative and ranty nature of this post. Perhaps you can think of it as a public service.

*About five minutes after I trashed the Blogger system and put HaloScan in place, a few comments that had been written hours earlier straggled into my e-mail box. Sorry. Too. Damn. Late.