Monday, February 15, 2010

JS-Kit Echo Comments: Brief review

I really dislike the new commenting system I bought from JS-Kit after Haloscan was discontinued. JS-Kit is Haloscan's successor, and the deal they gave me was this: Buy our system and keep all your comments, or go somewhere else without them for free.  Here's the short list of things I hate:

(1) Today the whole system seems terribly buggy. Comments are appearing and disappearing without rhyme or reason
(2) It's slow as molasses on a mobile. Haloscan loaded in a tenth of the time. This alone is reason enough to hate JS-Kit. In Haloscan days, I did 80 percent of my commenting on my phone. If I wanted to comment on my phone with JS-KIT with the same frequency, I'd be commenting 12 hours per day. Its that much slower.
(3) Threaded comments are an abomination
(4) I can't figure out how to search the comments. Seems impossible.
(5) Once in a while, the system will give me the power to edit my own comments (and yours if I'm logged in as the administrator) Other times, all I can do is delete comment; the editing button having disappeared. I have no idea why this happens, and can discern no pattern.

The list of things I like about this commenting system is even shorter:

(1) You get all sorts of whistles and bells, like a rich text editor, and email notification and much more. I suppose these extras are nice enough, only Haloscan didn't have them and no one cared.
(2) Two of the top guys at JS-Kit Tweet and have been responsive to complaints; also one of their programmers, a guy named Igor, gave super support a few weeks ago..

In short: Bring back Haloscan.

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