A quick update to let visitors to this blog know that I appear to be having some issues with the comment system. I have contacted IntenseDebate’s tech support people and am hoping to get some resolution before anything worse happens.
What happened? Yeah, well, I lost a couple of comments. One apparently is permanently gone, but I was able to retrieve and re-post the other. Most frustrating, but I shall refrain from whingeing.
If you have posted a comment and not seen it show up, please know that—unless I’ve personally told you I was going to (probably because you have actually threatened me in a comment or proven yourself to be a total nutcase, wanker, crank, git or prat)—I have not blocked you. And don’t worry that maybe your comment wound up being erroneously flagged as spam. I regularly check on the Oubliette (which, I suppose, is kinda funny that I do that and still call it an oubliette) de spam to make sure there’s only the excretory vomit of spammers and ne’er-do-wells emprisonné dans l’enfer existentiel.
UPDATE: No word yet from the tech people at IntenseDebate, which I understand it’s late and all—but…. The comment I re-posted has vanished again! I checked my blog out in another browser and it’s not showing up there, either, so I’m fairly convinced it’s gone from the page (though not from the WP Dashboard). I’m not yet having the fantods over it, but I am certainly about ready to send the present comment system packing in favor of—oh, I dunno, Disqus, maybe? ::shakes fist at IntenseDebate people in an unhappy manner::
Image by -StaR-DusT-
Sometimes you just have to move on something, or from something to something else. In this case, I have unceremoniously canned IntenseDebate. After having written to their tech support people—after the recent mysterious disappearance of a couple comments—I waited over 24 hours for any response and received not even the usual form response that is automatically kicked out when a user contacts tech support. Seriously, I’m writing this post and thinking, like, Okay… they’ll probably write me back while I’m writing this post. Any minute now. As I write. Uh-huh.
And so but I’ve still not received a response. And it’s all academic now anyway because I’ve disabled and removed the plug-in—I canned it; trashed it; dumped it; chucked it out; tossed it; wasted it; binned it; deleted its presence and erased its map—and then I deleted my blog from the IntenseDebate site. Such a shame it came to it, but there you go. It’s not something I needed to debate intensely. It simply came down to the fact that the system failed me all around and I didn’t want to put a lot of effort into it when it seemed like nothing good was going to come out of it anytime soon.
I apologize to anyone who is in any way inconvenienced by my drop-kicking IntenseDebate. It is my sincerest hope that, all things considered, y’all will be pleased with the replacement I chose: Disqus (pronouned “discuss”). You can now log in to your Facebook or Twitter account to make comments here, which seems fairly cool. I still have to learn a bit about how Disqus works, but it seems like a good replacement for something that failed me utterly. And, btw, I have walked away from this whole experience having learned a valuable lesson: Know Your Options. I should have looked around before installing something that was maybe good, maybe not so good. If I’d looked around I might have found Disqus in the first place. Then again, it may be that I’ll be failed again. I sure hope not, but I’m not so naïve as to assume that Disqus is a panacea just because it’s popular and loads of people use it. If you have any thoughts about Disqus, please share them with me. In the meantime I’ll be checking out just how well it works for me.