I received a notification this morning that my long time commenting system – Haloscan – was going to be shut down in two weeks. The company was purchased quite some time ago, and I knew this day was coming, but I am a long time procrastinator who hates messing with things that are working well enough. I have now taken the necessary steps to switch to the Echo commenting platform; supposedly all of the existing comments are now being transitioned.
I think I have made the settings selections on the new system that will most closely resemble the experience that you have been getting using Haloscan, but only experience will tell if those setting selections are the right ones. I have continued to allow comments to be posted without moderation in order to keep the conversation happening while I am too busy to moderate. That selection does not and will not stop me from deleting off topic or inappropriate content when I have the time.
Please do not hesitate to provide me with feedback over the next few weeks.
Testing the look and feel of the Echo system.
One more test to see what the dashboard looks like to a user that is not logged in.
What sort of mark-up are we permitted here?
DV82XL – the system says it accepts basic HTML. bold italics both should work.
The link for comments is a Javascript to force you to pop up a new window. It means you can’t right click on it to open it as a tab in the same browser. Feels like 1993 all over again (I know Mosaic was cool for its era but … sigh).
Tabbing down to the comment field doesn’t work as before, you must click in the field now. As far as I can see, there is no email update option to be notified when new comments are made, that’s not so good. The built in blogger comment system has that option. There doesn’t seem to be an option to pair a website to the commentator either. Maybe this needs some more configuring. Can the font be enlarged?
The Facebook connection and other Open ID connection types are a nice touch. There’s some other stuff here to like as well, but that lack of an email notice option…we’ll see.