A bit more on the new comments

I’ve had a few questions about the awesome new commenting system here, and luckily for me the guys at the Pensblog and Detroit 4 Lyfe put together quick tutorials on how the system works so I don’t have to do it myself. You can check out the whole thing here, and I’ll post the most important highlights. 

• You can comment using your Facebook or Twitter account or you can register through Livefyre. Signing in with your Bloguin account at the top of the page won’t work at the moment, though the long-term goal is to link that login to everything. Until then, well, you can pretty much ignore the login at the top of the page and just login directly the comments section. I know this sucks and I know another sign-in isn’t optimal, but frankly, the old comments were no long even usable (I literally was getting in excess of 50 spam comments per day, sometimes more, and since all comments from unregistered users had to be moderated, I had to delete them all individually to get to the real comments so they could be published) and so I’m happy to have these, even if we had to rush them a bit. 
• It auto-updates. Combine that with the Twitter log-in, and I’m super-pumped about this for game threads, which will hopefully be much, much better this year. 
• They’re reverse chronological now, with the newest comments coming at the top, except for the threaded replies. I would change this, but I’m not sure it’s a big deal and also I don’t know how to do it. 
• You can’t see the old comments at the moment, but they’re still on the server. 
• For some reason the comment number doesn’t appear. Hopefully this will change.
• I know some people have wondered why the comments 1.) sucked so much for two years and 2.) took so long to fix. The long and short of it is that Joomla, which is the CMS that powers Bloguin, doesn’t have a native comments plug-in and so we’ve been cycling through the available third party solutions since literally the dawn of time as far as the network is concerned without ever finding an acceptable solution (note that PG+ and the PBC Blog are also powered by Joomla and … that’s all I have to say about that). Joomla is great in that it gives everyone a ton of leeway with their individual sites and how they’re built and how they function (compare this site to The Pensblog, for exampe), but the comments thing was obviously a huge drawback. The Bloguin guys have been working with Livefyre for quite some time now to create a comment plug-in that’s built specifically for our network, but given the size of the network and the volume of comments on some of the sites, it took quite a while to develop. We’ve finally got a real solution, though.