Changes to HillBuzz Comment System – More to Come
I noticed some people remarking that their WordPress or Intense Debate logins no longer work on HillBuzz, so here is an update on the situation.
Now that the site is safe and secure on its new home, we’ve had more time to focus on previously less pressing issues, like improving the user experience and examining each of the tools we have deployed.
We noticed that the comments which showed up after each post did not always match the comments which showed as approved in our system. In some cases, we were missing close to half of the actual comments we thought we had approved. We also noticed that some comments never even showed up in our system at all, somehow being lost in the black hole of the Intense Debate comment synchronization service.
After further investigation we found out that we’re not the only ones who have noticed this problem. Google reveals that many other sites have stopped using Intense Debate for this exact problem. Apparently, although it is a known issue, there is no fix on the horizon.
So we went ahead and disabled that tool, at least for the time being. We are trying out some alternative tools for catching spam, and are looking for a better overall solution which will hopefully dramatically improve our commenting system.
For now, most people will still have to wait a bit before their comments show up. But know that we are working diligently to improve your experience here, and will keep tweaking, testing, and toying with tools until we find the best possible solution!
© 2012, Robert James. All rights reserved.
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"Bee" Advised!
I look forward to your comments. Please follow these simple guidelines:
- Please do not complain about your comment not yet showing up
- Stay on topic of the article ("This is OT, but..." = bad!)
- I will STING if you troll, spam, bait, swear or attack someone
Thanks for the explanation. I thought I was doing something awry.
Very thoughtful of you to keep followers up to date. Thank you. And well done!
Echoing Ferd Berfle here, thank you for both the explanation and the new “Reply” system.
As a relatively new poster to these reply threads, I am glad to know that it wasn’t HillBuzz axing my comments. I wrote one pretty informed post about investment returns that never made it onto the site…I thought Kevin had “eighty-sixed” it. A few other less well written offerings likewise never showed up. Again, nice to know it was most likely internet gremlins that censored me.
The gremlins are terrible! At this point there’s no way for us to go back and try to figure out what happened with your post(s), but generally speaking, it’s our goal to make sure your comments get posted as long as they adhere to the three primary HillBuzz commenting guidelines shown by the HillBuzz bee above the comment form.
We’re getting close. Progress is being made for sure. But it looks like we might have to get a custom tool written for handling things the way we need them.
Thanks, I’d like to be able to sign in to something and have a profile.
Thank you so much for the hard work you all have been putting into this site. It is greatly appreciated and HillBuzz is vital to this country’s continued existence as the Leftists push ever harder. Imua!
Good work, all! Thanks for the updates.
Thanks for the update. I continue to read and support Hillbuzz.
Rats. I can’t remember with which system I was logging on. Hah, Bumbug.
Kevin does that explain why some comments are automatically “deleted by the administrator” as soon as the comment was posted?
If this is the case, then that is a reasonable explanation for the comments disappearing. It is a good move to disable Intense Debate.
You are correct. The “deleted by administrator” issue was one of the problems we uncovered. Obviously there was no administrator who was actually deleting comments the moment they were submitted, so Intense Debate was deleting them automatically for whatever reason.
Intense Debate did not give us the ability to tweak the error message, and it also did not give us any statistics on how many comments had been deleted in that way. So it was definitely a problem.
Hopefully it won’t be an issue now!
When I had Intense Debate at my place, it would delete my own comments and I was the blog’s only administrator! I switched to DISQUS soon after and have had it ever since, even taking it with me to my new site. I get emailed notifications when people comment and also when DISQUS holds a comment for moderation if is suspects it is spam or it’s from an unregistered user (you can adjust the settings so you only get notified of certain things rather than have you inbox flooded if you are a high comment traffic site). Moderation is super easy too and you get lots of different options for security settings. Once you have the security settings set how you want them, you don’t have to worry about it. You can open, close or set comments to be held for admin approval for individual blog posts so if you know that you’ve got a post on controversial subject matter, you can change the settings for that post only while leaving the original settings the same for everything else. I have done that when some of my posts attract death threats and other unpleasantness. Being able to adjust the settings frees up a lot of your time that you’d otherwise spend moderating comments so you can spend more time actually blogging or interacting with your readers.
I am delighted that you’ve finally rid yourselves of Intense Debate. I had it briefly at the original Zilla blog and it was a hot mess so I got rid of it and installed DISQUS instead. I have rarely had a problem since and I liked DISQUS so much that I brought it with me when I moved from Blogger to my own server, and it still works great! DISQUS gives you extra tools for managing trolls and also the ability to “whitelist” known friendly commenters so that their comments post immediately. I would recommend it highly to anyone looking to replace their blog’s default system.
Of course the system you have right now looks just fine too, I like the cute Bee for the “like” button and we are able to post replies under other HillBuzz friends’ comments which keeps threads from being too confusing.
I used to be an active participant in the HillBuzz comments, especially on Open Threads, but shortly after Kevin made his glorious return, Intense Debate decided that it hated me and would delete anything I wrote no matter how innocuous, immediately after clicking to submit. It was very frustrating and it became an incredible waste of my time to even try commenting here so I stopped even trying very much. I love the people who hang out in the comments section here and miss talking with them. Hopefully now that you guys are on the issue, I can again feel as if I am a part of the HillBuzz comments community. I truly miss that.
XOXOXO
Disqus is one of the options we’re looking at. We are feeling kind of reluctant to go with another “sync” system after Intense Debate. One of the things that Intense Debate did was replace all your normal comment links with its own. It wasn’t until we had some custom tweaking done that we even realized there was such a mismatch between the internal comment count on any given post and the comment count that Intense Debate was reporting. Once we noticed that issue, we started digging into it more and that’s when we realized that upwards of half of all comments were disappearing into the ether somehow.
We will continue to look in to our options and will let folks know if/when we make a change.
As far as comments having been banished by Intense Debate – every person who has reported this so far, I have looked up their info on the Intense Debate settings and found no reason why their info would have triggered an automatic deletion or anything of that nature. So I’m left to conclude that Intense Debate just isn’t a very good piece of software.
I am not sure (because I didn’t bother to check it when I moved), but DISQUS might allow you to merge it with your existing comments, I know I was able to do it while still on Blogger but after everything else I had to do when I moved to the new site, I was just too lazy and exhausted to see if I could do it on my own server.
The system you have right now looks fine too, maybe you can add soem bells and whistles, but the fact that we are able to post and can reply to other people’s comments directly beneath them are really the two most important things IMHO.
BTW Today, February 29, 2012, is Bloggers Appreciation Day! I have a new post up at my place about it, but I want everyone at HillBuzz know how much I appreciate all of YOUR hard work, so Happy Blogger’s Appreciation Day! (Enjoy it now because it doesn’t happen again for another 4 years!)
Disqus works for me
I am glad to learn this information. I was worried that, when my comments were not showing up, I was offending folks and therefore my posts were deleted. Yet I couldn’t figure out how or why I was offending anyone. Anyway . . . good stuff to know! Thanks!
I recall I had about 2 or 3 comments immediately deleted by administrator. Usually gave a heavy sigh and wandered off.
Yes we were largely unaware of this happening, and we are still unclear on why it was happening. Intense Debate told us this would only occur if the post tripped something on our black list, but there were only 3 words in the word filter, and none of the users we checked were listed in the banned users.
Once we discovered that, and the problem with comments not syncing correctly, we switched Intense Debate off right away.
Just testing..
It works it works!