Changing Comment Features to this Blog

I had an issue with Haloscan's comment feature not allowing visitors to view the comments. Moreover, if someone made a comment on a particular post, I had no idea which post the comment was referring to for the longest time. (They fixed this in late September of 2005). It was a very frustrating experience. I think I paid $18 a year ago for Haloscan premium features.

The only feature that I wanted back then was the ability to be e-mailed when a comment was posted on my Blog. Haloscan practially stopped creating significant features many months ago. I'm glad to let them go. Haloscan - you deserve to die.

A year ago, Blogger.com comment features passed Haloscan's features in a lot of areas.

I really like the threaded comment feature where visitors can see the trail of comments per post. I liked what I saw when I converted back to Blogger's comment system. I only regret that I cannot transfer Haloscan comments back to Blogger's comment database. There are hundreds of comments that I'll be losing. This is heartbreaking.

The biggest problem that I encountered was that the comment record counter for Haloscan wasn't working right. The count would show zero even though I knew there were comments there. Moreover, visitors could never see comments being made even though I was receiving e-mails of comments being posted. I lived with this for roughly 3 months because I didn't have the energy to figure this out.

Yesterday, I put in the energy to fix all this. I concluded that Haloscan lost it's superior edge from two years ago and that Blogger's comment feature set has improved enough to go back to it. Great job Blogger/Google!

On a side note, Haloscan sure made it easy to add itself when I first added it to the Blogger template. But, the uninstall required knowing what javascript and HTML portions of the template one could delete. This is definitely not something I would recommend newb Bloggers do on their own without some guidance and backing up their Blogger Template before making changes.

Oh yeah, the Blogger Adsense integration in Blogger settings is not great. I deleted that too while I was cleaning things up. I wouldn't suggest using it in the Blogger settings. I would still use the adsense code that one obtains directly from Google Adsense directly. Personally, I removed all Google Adsense from this Blog, because it was slowing down the load time of the page. The size of the Blog already makes it a little slow so I didn't want to add to the slow down.

The feature that I'm now looking for is the ability for people who post comments to be notified when trailing comments are posted as well. Who likes to waste time by coming back to find out what was said later on? It's a waste of time! Blogger/Google... get with it. This really needs to be added!

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When I wrote this Blog entry, I found that Blogger was down. I couldn't submit or connect to save the Blog entry. This is absolutely hilarious. I'm sitting here writing about features, but the real problem is availability of service.