I never used to leave comments on blogs. I lacked the confidence. I didn’t think I had anything to contribute. Since I started this site, I have made a point to leave comments. Now, I enjoy the interaction with others. Well, usually. The most enjoyable sites to comment on are one’s where the author responds and appreciates her community.
As I started commenting more, I found it difficult to keep track of where I had commented. Sometimes I would ask a question and then forget to return and see if there was a response. I’ve tried a couple of solutions to this and am currently using commentful by blogflux.
I am intrigued by Disqus, especially since the new WordPress plugin which syncs Disqus with WordPress, but am hesitant to install it. For example, they had an outage last night, which affected comments. At least when I am in complete control I only have to worry about the stability of my web host, which, after 5 great years has not been so good lately.
Ok, I went off on a tangent there. Commentful requires a free registration and then allows you to track up to 200 comment threads. It works best with Firefox and Flock because you can install the extension and simply right click and select ‘add to commentful’ on a page that has comments that you want to track. When new comments have been added to a watched thread, the yellow ball that the extension installs at the bottom of the browser will turn green. Click on the ball and your watchlist will be opened. The threads with new comments will be highlighted and you can click through to the site.
For other browsers comments can be tracked and viewed using a bookmarklet and RSS feeds. Instructions are on the Usage Page.
This isn’t an ideal solution. Sometimes it doesn’t work, although it has been stable lately, and when I emailed support they never responded to me.
Do you leave blog comments? Do you care about tracking them? If so, what is your method of comment tracking. I would love to find out about other solutions.
photo credit: obo-bobolina
I’m definitely going to look at commentful as I am disorganised in my commenting.
I prefer to leave comments on blogs that have a ‘subscribe to comments’ plugin so that I receive notifiction of any follow ups.
Barring a few sites, such as this one, if they don’t have that option in place then I will very likely forget to return to check for follow-ups.
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I prefer it when people have the subscribe to comments plugin – that makes it much easier for me – I don’t have to do anything.
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@scam
Is that a comment subscription via email? Would you recommend that I install that for people to use? I have a subscribe to comments via RSS but I guess that I forget that many people prefer email to RSS – personally I don’t like getting more email than I already do.
Commentful is not a perfect solution. It is just the best one I have found so far. Co-comment used to be good but with Firefox 3 it just didn’t work properly and the developers didn’t seem interested in fixing the problems. It may have been corrected by now but I grew impatient and moved on.
I am also intriqued by Disqus but it only works, of course, with blogs that use it. It seems like a good way to get a site and comments noticed but I am fearful of allowing another site to have control over the functionality of mine.
@Trisha – seems that we were both posting at the same time :-) So, now I have two votes for this plugin – I guess I should install it.
If you look at my site when you comment there is a tick box that allows you to subscribe to the comments on that particular post via email.
It’s a WordPress plugin called “Subscribe To Comments” funnily enough, and I for one always use it on the blogs I comment on where it is installed as it makes life much simpler indeed!
I’ve never heard of Disqus – is it any good?
Aha… as I went to post this comment I noticed your new check box – well done! :)
Scam,
Both you and Trisha said that you like the subscribe to comments feature so I figured that there were a lot more people out there who would want to use it.
It is, however, annoying me. I can’t seem to style it to look the way that I want it to. I spent way too much time late last night messing around with it. And it’s frustrating to test because you have to keep logging in and out so that you are seeing what it looks like when you aren’t the administrator. Do you have any tips on placement or making it look the way that I want.
I don’t know if Disqus is any good but there’s been a lot of buzz about it lately. Mashable has a good review – http://mashable.com/2008/08/12/disqus-wordpress-plugin/
Also, thanks for saying that you check the site even though you couldn’t subscribe to comments. :-)
Unfortunately, my coding skills arn’t great – I simply installed the plugin and left the tick box where it appeared!
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