The time has come for us to finally ditch Haloscan. Actually, that time came quite some time ago, but we never had a decent alternative.
Until now.
The main reason for our moving to Disqus is that it offers better moderating tools, and it's better suited to Shakesville's dynamic community. It's actually more than just a commenting system; it's also a community building system.
As part of managing comments with Disqus, we have our own community page. Think of this page as a comment portal for Shakesville. You can see all of the active discussions taking place on each post, and even subscribe to the ones you are interested in via RSS feeds!
One of the features that I think you'll really like is threaded comments. For those who are not familiar, threading of comments means that you will be able to directly reply to someone else's comment. Once you're done with the reply it will appear as an indented sub-comment under the one you replied to. Keep in mind, however, that we have set a maximum thread depth of 3 so that we don't end up with endless replies scrolling off the right side of the screen. :)
Instead of a popup window, clicking the comment link will now bring you to the individual post page and immediately place you at the top of the comments. To add a comment, just scroll to the bottom and add away, or reply to an existing comment as mentioned above.
OK - I'm totally not getting any kickback whatsoever from Disqus LOL. I'm just trying to let you know that the growing pains will be worth your while.
Please leave any questions or issues in comments!
Note: Apologies that we're going to lose some conversations mid-thread; that was always going to be a problem no matter when we did it—and we're sorry about that. Also FYI: Blogger's kind of hosed today, so if the site is running slowly, it's just that, not any difference in performance due to Disqus.
Update: Anyone using IE as their browser should now be able to see the number of comments from the main page.
Shakesville is run as a safe space. First-time commenters: Please read Shakesville's Commenting Policy and Feminism 101 Section before commenting. We also do lots of in-thread moderation, so we ask that everyone read the entirety of any thread before commenting, to ensure compliance with any in-thread moderation. Thank you.
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