“Some men see things as they are and say ‘why’? Others dream things that never were and say ‘why not’?â€
~ George Bernard Shaw
The 17 long time readers know that I have spent a chunk of time testing out different commenting systems. At one time or another I have used Blogger, Haloscan, Intense Debate, DISQUS, the WP native system, CommentLuv and Livefyre.
When I first moved from Blogger to WP I spent a chunk of time using DISQUS and was relatively happy with it, but there were a few issues and I chose to move to Livefyre.
My initial go around with LF was good but I received a regular flow of complaints from several readers about it. Technical issues with the system made it impossible to comment so I moved over to using CommentLuv with the WordPress native commenting system.
That worked very well and overall I was quite happy with it. However recently I have been getting hammered with comments that straddle the line between spam and useful and it is creating an enormous amount of work.
These people aren’t commenting because they want to be part of our community or because they are trying to advance the conversation and I am tired of it. LiveFyre is about to roll out a number of changes that sound very exciting and I think the time is right to turn it back on.
I want to see if that helps fix the problem. I also like the fluid manner in which LF encourages community building within a comment section so I am ready to see if that will work here.
And that is why I turned it back on. In the interim your old comments should be importing themselves into the system and business is going on as usual here. We’ll take another swing at bat and see how it plays out.
As always if you have questions, comments or concerns please feel free to leave them in the comments or to contact me.
…and yet you now use Disqus. Maybe you have a newer post about it? (I found this one from Google.)
Timely, I am meeting with my web developer today and part of my shift to self-host is a commenting platform. I have chosen lifefyre because it seems like a good system. I see a lot on ohter blogs. Is that because it’s good? or just easy to install and manage? I dunno but i am about to find out.
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Going to self-host kinda scares me a bit because I am not that tech savvy. Not stupid but haven’t spent much time researching the opitons. Anyway, hope it works out for you and i will let you know when I have migrated assuming you want to know.
 @rdopping Hi Ralph, self hosting is the way to go. It provides many more options and more importantly it helps you protect your content. When you use someone else’s platform you risk a lot.
They could choose to delete your blog and you have no recourse.After all the time you have spent working on it that would be quite frustrating.
As for as tech questions you may not realize how much support you have. There are lots of us who would be willing to answer questions and or lend a hand. That doesn’t take into account all the video tutorials and other resources you can find online.
I look forward to seeing the new look.
Hey Jack,
I have a love/hate relationship with LF and the other commenting systems. I’m not sure why, but I don’t like to log in to a third party service to comment. But I do understand why people are using it. It’s so much easier to keep spammers away and it’s great to keep the conversation going.
Let me know how it goes.
 @Jens Hi. I understand what you are saying. That was part fo the reason I turned it off and stopped using it.
I don’t want to create any more road blocks or hurdles for people to overcome so that they can comment. But I figure that sometimes it is worth mixing things up to see if we can improve things a bit.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
 @TheJackB I’m looking forward to it. I have been thinking about installing LiveFyre as well. And that’s mostly because I love the way you can keep the conversation going and tag friends on Twitter and Facebook to get them in the conversation.
 @Jens I like that function a lot too.
Let’s see how it works out for you. When I shifted from Blogger to WP I stuck on with Disqus and really don’t feel like changing over somehow…. for me its more about just sticking to what I have right now.Â
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But yes, a lot of people are tempting me for Livefyre….let’s see! 😉
 @Hajra I am not sure yet how it will work out. It is a free service so I shouldn’t complain, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t concerned about how slowly my older comments are importing.