An Apology on Disappearing Comments

I wish to apologize to readers of the InfoWorld Gripe Line who may have posted or tried to post comments to my stories last week. InfoWorld recently began experimenting with a new comment engine called JS-Kit in my weblog. I should have paid a little more attention to it in terms of making sure it was ready for my readers because, whoops, last week it proved it wasn’t.

The basic idea behind trying out JS-Kit, which I’m all for, is to have the same kind of threaded discussions on my stories in the Gripe Line as we have in my GripeLog pages. (It’s a long story how we got to the point where the same weblog item has different comments on the two sites — a story that even I don’t remember all the details of very well — but, hey, that’s where we are.) JS-Kit seems to have the features we need, such as allowing readers to post anonymously if they wish, so after some in-house testing we decided to give it a try.

Unfortunately, sometime early last week readers’ comments would appear to post correctly but would soon disappear. Only after readers started complaining to me and I relayed the gripes to InfoWorld did JS-Kit figure out where the problem was in order to make the comments visible.

So, hopefully, this was just one of those little glitches. The main thing that was lost was any comment threads on last week’s stories that might have resulted if readers could have seen what others were posting. If you found the laptop border searches and/or the rebate games story of interest, you might want to check out the comments now and see if you have anything to add.

That’s the way we’ll find out if JS-Kit can do the job or not. If you do run into problems with disappearing comments or anything else, please write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com. One thing I can guarantee you now — I will be paying attention.