The Real Blogger Status

Blog owners are periodically asking themselves How do I invite my readers to leave comments? Some blog owners think of commenting as the most important way to get new readers. One of the most seemingly insignificant components of the Blogger template is the link to invite the readers to leave comments. This is not a simple feature - it varies according to where the comment form is placed, and to different language and style decisions.

The new two level commenting feature has been out for a short 2 days - and already there are at least half a dozen separate problems being attributed to the introduction of that feature. Not every blog owner understands how intrusive this new feature must have been, to install, into Blogger. The previous two Blogger feature releases - dynamic templates, and the New Blogger GUI, required major changes to the Blogger GUI. Two level commenting, while not requiring major GUI changes, was still challenging to develop. Two level comments required a significant upgrade to the content of our blogs, and were activated without the decision of the blog owners involved.

Yesterday, Blogger Support delivered one long awaited improvement to our blogs - two level commenting . It was eagerly awaited - and as soon as the Buzz announcement hit the Blogosphere, people were busy checking out the new feature. Predictably, problem reports have been rolling in, all day today, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . One noticed problem report concerns the date / time stamp on the comments. All of the comments on my blog, even on previous posts, now show an incorrect time. I double-checked my setting, it is correctly set my local time. The general consensus appears to be that all comments are now posting as Pacific Time (USA), regardless of the blog time zone setting. This problem, along with several others, has been reported to Blogger Support - and they are now looking into this issue. Watch this space for updates. >> Top

Blogger blog owners and viewers have been asking for the ability to post threaded comments, for many years. Today (slightly late for Christmas 2011), Blogger released it's first answer to that request - two level commenting . Blogger now supports threaded commenting, which means that it is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread. This is not what I would call classic "threaded commenting", but it's a reasonable alternative.

Some blog guests cannot understand why they can't get notifications, when someone leaves a comment after them, attached to a post comment form. Why don't I see the option to "Email follow-up comments to xxxxxxx@yyyyy.zzz"? or maybe I selected the option to "Email follow-up comments to xxxxxxx@yyyyy.zzz", but I don't get any reply notifications. Why am I being mistreated by Blogger? These people do not realise that comment follow-up notifications are subject to the same problems as the embedded comment form .

We've been observing problems with commenting on blogs using the inline comment form ("Embedded below post"), ever since Blogger changed the inline form, many months ago . First, we observed an overall problem with cookie filtering and the embedded comment form . Later, a more subtle problem with using the CAPTCHA form with embedded comments was discovered. Now, we're seeing a similar problem, with the new dynamic templates, and the embedded comment form. This problem may not be any more obvious, to some blog readers, than the preceding problems were.

This week, we're seeing a new flood of complaints from people who report I posted my comment, but it vanished! and blog owners, who report My readers report inability to find their comments after they are published. And no, they are not in my "Spam" folder. Why are all of these comments disappearing?