I use, and really like, several google services. When I wanted to start a blog a few years ago it only made sense to use the free blogger platform that they offer. I didn't know anything about it, but I wasn't sure what features I needed or what else was out there. I have now created and designed several blogs on blogger. I only post on this blog and my pretendcritic.com site. I created my wife's blog design, and update that on a somewhat regular basis. Blogger is great and easy to use. I love that they give me full access to the html code so I can tweak it however I want. They have made a lot of improvements over the past couple years. However, the one thing that is still severely lacking is the comment system.From the beginning of my film blog I have had tons of issues with the blogger commenting system. I have been contacted via email more that once by a reader who wanted to leave a comment and it just wouldn't do it. Who knows how often this has happened and they didn't bother to send me a message. I don't get a ton of comments on my blog, and I was starting to think the blogger comment system had something to do with it. I do need to mention that I have custom domains on both of my blog. Basically I just don't have to use the ".blogspot". Most of the issues I've had with comments also comes from people not signed in with their google account to post.
The blogger annoyance was great enough for me to sign up for a Wordpress account. Another "free" blogging platform that has a much better commenting system. Turns out the free service doesn't offer full access to the code, and I found it overall much more limiting. The posting system was awkward, and I just didn't like the interface. I'm sure wordpress enthusiasts would scoff, but I just didn't like it. Wordpress does have a paid version that offers full access to everything. I am sure this is quite good, but I wasn't going to pay. My blog and film site are merely hobbies, and not monetized. I am not signing up for a monthly payment.
The good news is that there are a few 3rd party apps for improving the blogger comment system. The most popular is probably Disqus. I had looked at going this route before, but I got scared. It used to require that you take your comments completely out of the blogger system. The comments would not exist at all in blogger, but would just be tied to your blog by your Disqus account. That worried me because if something were to happen to that connection, or Disqus itself, then everything would be gone. I still wanted those comments in the blogger system. Good news! Disqus now offers a syncing service between them and blogger. Now when a comment is left via disqus they send it right over to blogger and it is saved there too. If for some reason you ever wanted to stop using Disqus all your comments would be fine. I've implemented Disqus on both my blogger blogs now, and so far I really like it.
I had issues with the syncing on my film blog. It duplicated a ton of them. Hundreds of them. I thought I could delete and re-sync. I deleted from blogger, but they didn't sync back. I thought I had lost all my comments from blogger. I sent an email to the Disqus support email and within a day I had a response and all my comments synced back. I was very happy.
For a few weeks my comments seemed to be working without a hitch. It was great. Then all the sudden blogger started screwing up the comment counts. Now on the main page there will be one count of comments listed, then when you open up the individual post it will change (to the correct number). This is entirely a blogger issue and seems to have nothing to do with Disqus. Is anybody else experiencing this? I have searched online and there are reports of this happening over a year ago, but nothing recently. Once again, this seems to be limited to sites with custom domains. What a headache. Comments seem like such a simple thing to handle, but blogger can't seem to get it right. I really like Disqus and am ready to switch to that completely, but my little bubble at the top of each post can only be populated with the blogger comment count, so I still need that to be accurate.
Blogger is an awesome service, but if you have a custom domain it seems to totally jack the comments. I'm sorry if anybody has tried to comment on either of my blogs and not been able to. I'm sorry if you left a comment and it never appeared or got removed. Using Disqus should improve/eliminate those issues, but now my comment counts are all messed up. Frustrating.
Here is a thread on the blogger forum that describes my exact problem. However, it says it has been resolved months ago.
