Comment Addenda
By 
A couple more thoughts on the comment transition…
We are firmly of the camp “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” with regard to technical updates to the blog. I can appreciate that, from the outside, it does not appear that the comment system is broken. From the inside, however, we’re on the edge of collapse; the tools that we’ve been using for years to manage comments are breaking down and becoming non-functional. This has meant slower (and less effective) elimination of trolls, slower liberation of comments pushed into “pending,” and slow-to-non-existent responses to editorial requests. Our tech people tell us that things will not get better without a significant expansion of our server footprint, which will cost more than moving to Disqus while providing less functionality.
With regards to the complaints about Disqus… I get it. If we loved Disqus we would have moved over years ago. But I honestly don’t see that much of an overall difference for the commenting experience between the system we have now and the system we’ll be adopting. For the administrator, on the other hand, Disqus offers many more management tools than WordPress. It’s not a total lock that all of these tools will be used for good, but at least there’s some reason to expect that they’ll work three months from now.
In any case, I plan to be around all day tomorrow, troubleshooting the problems that can be troubleshot. As always, thank you for your patience…
The Management