Dear Readers: I think I may owe all of you an apology. Today I got this message from a reader (who shall remain anonymous) through my Facebook profile:
I have for some time been unable to comment at your website (so it occurs to me you won’t be accepting this request). It is for you to decide who may use your website, and I am sure I too will eventually be more discriminating. However, if I have done anything beyond having perhaps a very marked difference of opinion, I’d like to extend my apologies.
However neither I nor James were ever even aware of these comments… How many others of you out there have been getting blocked? Will all these problems with my @$#%-ing comments ever stop?
I feel just terrible about this, and mortified with embarrassment. Please understand that it has never been our intention to censor comments here or ban users … the only few times we have had to remove comments was what we considered to be specific personal threats, hate speech, and spam. My problems with the comments technology has been long-running. Earlier this year, we were running a somewhat clunky but simple CATCHPA. There were complaints that it wasn’t working properly, and lots of spam was getting in. Before that we had TypeKey, which is discouraging because you have to register and remember yet another password. Now we are running Ajax, which I thought would solve all these problems, but now everything looks worse. Only a few users seem to be able to reliably leave comments, while still the spam sometimes makes it through.
Needless to say, I am a lawyer, and not a internet coding whiz – I confess to having a pretty limited understanding about how some of my blog tools work. Unfortunately our developer guy is way too expensive to bother with this kind of stuff. James will probably spend the weekend looking for a new comments system, but if any of you have any tips about what works best for Movable Type 4, please email me and let me know. Also please email me if you have had similar problems, and I will offer you all my personal apology.
In closing, I am grateful to everyone who comes by here to read our news and opinions, including those who thoroughly disagree with the majority of them. I wish you all a wonderful summer weekend, hopefully a little less frustrating than mine will be. – Bob Amsterdam
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8 Comments
When one clicks on remember personal info, the comment doesn’t go
Have you guys checked out Disqus.com ?I use Disqus and highly recommend it. Not sure if it works with Movable Type but I have to believe that it does.
Here’s a link:http://plugins.movabletype.org/disqus-action-streams-plugin/
I told you about the problem with “remember personal info” months ago. There are also serious problems with attempting to insert links in comments, the system often treats them as SPAM even if there is only one. Finally, it takes an OUTRAGEOUS amount of time after clicking “submit” for the comment to post, and if you close the page and don’t wait the comment can also be lost.If you want to solve your problem, all you have to do is move the blog to WordPress. I have none of these problems, never have, nor any other kind of technical problem, and it’s 100% free. The only disadvantage is that WordPress doesn’t let you post YouTube because of security considerations, but the security benefits more than make up for it.I’d be exceedingly careful about taking advice from the likes of Timothy Post. You might as well take it from Vladimir Putin himself, the individual is pond scum.
Hey La Russophobe, fuck off!!!
Hmmm… Not sure that’s the kind of debate we’re looking to engender by fixing the comments system, but thanks anyways.I think I just have to fix Ajax to work properly – WordPress is not a possibility for us, we’re committed to MT4.Keep the suggestions coming, and we’ll do our best despite our coding incompetence….
JAMES:There’s no debate as anyone can clearly see from his “response.” Mr. Post cruises around the Internet pretending to be an objective observer when in fact he’s a businessman looking to turn a profit from Western investment in Russia and up to his eyeballs in Kremlin collaboration, a fact he never tells anyone. And the nature of his character can be clearly seen by his obscenely vulgar profanity, which fills in for his total lack of substance. He’s clearly been taking lessons on the Runet. If you’d like to open your blog to all manner of spy worms (you are, of course, marked by the Kremlin) then by all means take his advice.Dunno what you mean by “committed” but if you’re paying anything for this crap, you should sue. If not you’re as free as a bird; you could move all your content to WordPress in an hour or two with a couple of mouse clicks and be up and running. I’ve used Moveable Type and consider it a nightmare. No coding required on WordPress! Just blissful publishing. By the way, I noticed just today that you can put YouTubes in your posts if you want to pay a nominal monthly fee, so in fact they have no limitations at all.You’ve been saying you’ll fix these problems for months, but you never do.
Well, we’ve gone through four different comments systems, so it’s not as though we’re not trying to fix problems.