Trying Out a New Commenting System

Hi everyone, I’m just performing a little experiment with Universe Today. We were previously using Disqus for comments on Universe Today, but I got a lot of concerns from readers.

So, I’m trying out a new system called Comments Evolved. This integrates comments from Google+, Facebook, Disqus and even WordPress if we want. I’m just enabling the Google+ version, because… everyone’s got a Google account.

If you want, I can enable the Facebook, Disqus and WordPress versions as well once I know this is working.

So why am I doing this? Why am I continuously making your life difficult with all this technology switcheroo?

Because managing comments on a public blog is like working at a SPAM factory. Behind the scenes here, we spend a MASSIVE amount of time killing SPAM, banning spambots, etc, etc. Not only do Nancy and I have to do it, but we actually have a few readers of Universe Today who we’ve deputized to help kill SPAM. And lots gets through.

In fact… we had turned off comments for posts older than 14 days because it was completely impossible to stay on top of the SPAM for all 15,000 articles within Universe Today.

So, in theory, by switching to this system… all the comments will have to go through Google’s SPAM filters first. You as users can identify comments as SPAM, and get them removed from the site, and teach Google how to do this better.

If it doesn’t work, we’ll just hack it out and go back to something else.

Feel free to drop me an email at info@universetoday.com if you notice any bugs or have any further suggestions.