System note: the third-party plugin I have used for comments FIVE AND A HALF YEARS has been retired by its parent company. I failed to take action during the courtesy window in which users were able to switch to the new program, so now comments do not appear here anymore. FIVE AND A HALF YEARS of comments are gone.
I’ve contacted their support staff and pinged one of the executives on Twitter. So far I think they might be listening, so hopefully I’ll get it all back and functional soon. I am hesitant to revert to Blogger comments because I still use the old template – I never switched to the new drag-and-drop template system because that’s for pansies.
Kidding. I’m kidding. I just hate change. Which is why I selectively ignored Haloscan’s warnings, and now I may be screwed into upgrading to the paid version of comments. I’ve already upgraded to the paid versions of Photobucket (blackmail!) and Sitemeter and an online backup service. And now I’m contemplating a very $$$ switch to a MacBook Pro. Who said the internet is free?
Testing
Testing…
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Good luck with your efforts with JS-Kit/Echo. I complained a little too directly for their liking and I seem to have been banned from the support site.
They are merging all the complaints or indications of shortcomings under one almost meaningless heading to hide just how many complaints there are. Here's a google cache of my penultimate attempt (get it while it lasts) to start a new topic that got merged in order to hide it
As it happens you may well be able to retrieve your comments but I think you'll have to re-post them all yourself to the blog posts they relate to.
Personally, I saw and acted on the blackmail demand and paid $9.99 a few weeks ago so I have the substandard Echo system on my blog and I can get all the old comments in Excel format. Also the old comments are still in place but in the sub-standard Echo format.
The issues most people are raising with Echo are:
1. there is no "Manage all comments" page,
2. there is no unique url for each comment,
3. in the moderation page there is no blog title with the comments so moderators don't immediately know what the comment relates to
4. commenters cannot volunteer their email and homepage.
From some of the responses given by staff, execs and one troll ("Michael") for JS-Kit, I think that the acquisition of haloscan by JS-Kit was an exercise in asset stripping. The demand for $9.99 or lose your comments was disgraceful and may well be actionable. I don't know how much this raised for the company but it's particularly irksome that some of us paid what we were told was a lifetime fee of $12 for haloscan premium account and have had to pay again and some people put a lot of time and effort into working a service for free only to be compelled to adopt a far worse system
I've started a blog, Echo sucks! that you may like to comment on now or when other issues arise.
But good luck again.
Love your blog. I'll be back for sure. Our blogs are semi-similar; I'd love your feedback about mine, if you have a sec!
http://www.TodaysCliche.com. Thanks!!