Sunday, April 20, 2014

In Which I Deprecate an Entire Application

Over the years I've installed, used and administered a number of commenting/discussion systems on the various web sites I run or help administer. Over time, my preferences have narrowed down to two systems. Recently they've narrowed to one: Disqus.

Disqus had been gaining on IntenseDebate in my affections anyway -- it seems to do a better job of automagically canning spam, it was ahead of IntenseDebate in terms of offering multiple login options, etc. But the last straw came a few months ago:

In Chrome (at least -- maybe in other browsers as well), I can no longer bulk delete comments by selecting a bunch of them, choosing "delete" from "bulk actions" and hitting the "apply" button. That function is still visible. But it doesn't work.

I've been unable to find anything about this problem in IntenseDebate's support area, and I've had no reply to my direct inquiries on the subject.

That's a deal breaker for me. At one web site where I do a bit of administration work, including comment moderation, it's not unusual for hundreds of spam comments to show up in moderation (as opposed to being automatically deleted) each day. Now I have to click on "delete" for each and every one of those comments, instead of being able to smoosh them 25 at a time. Or to put it a different way, what used to take 10 seconds now takes 60.

I've removed IntenseDebate and installed Disqus at every site I actually own or have full operational authority over. I'm encouraging sites I do comment moderation work on to do likewise.

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