It's not the first time that Google have decided my blog comments should remain invisible to me. Apparently it is some arbitrary ruling to do with the commenter not being in my circles, or I am not in their circles. Something to do with circles anyway. But it's so annoying. If someone has taken the time to write on my blog post, they must want their words to be seen. Obvious, innit?
In exasperation, I have done my research about other commenting options that are compatible with Blogger. Disqus and CommentLuv seemed to be the favourites and I have used both on other blogs so am comfortable with them. CommentLuv won out for me though because its installation intructions at IntenseDebate.com were straightforward enough for me to feel confident about twiddling with my blog's settings. CommentLuv also allows commenters with blogs to easily link up a recent post of their own. I love to see what other people are writing about :-)
I have only set the new system up for yet-to-be-written posts because I don't want to lose what has already been written and couldn't see an import option. So the big test will be when I press Publish for this post ... will CommentLuv be enabled and waiting for us? If you can see it, please do comment and let me know ;-)
Here goes ...
So, there went, and writing again now, a couple of days later, it's a mixed review. CommentLuv worked perfectly on the desktop version of my blog and people left comments to prove it.
However, CommentLuv didn't show up at all on the mobile blog version so that was showing a Google-hosted comment box. (Not Google+, just Google. Not sure where it came from but it seems to be the Blogger default setting!) I could have managed with this duality if Google and CommentLuv had kept their distances. But today another visitor commented via the Google facility on the mobile version which caused the pre-existing CommentLuv comments on the desktop version to vanish from my post, being replaced by the Google conversation. Apologies to Andy and Aj for losing your comments. I wasn't expecting that! (And I think I am developing a headache.)
So in conclusion, as I want to keep CommentLuv and am now even more irritated with Google, I have hidden the default Blogger comment facility which I think will prevent anyone using it on my blog pages. It does also mean no one can comment at all via the mobile site version, but hopefully this won't be too inconvenient for phone wielding visitors? Plus no one can comment on posts - including this one - where there are (now) existing comments via Google. It's certainly not ideal and is getting very confusing.
I have trawled the IntenseDebate.com help pages to no avail so would be interested to hear from others who have had the same problem, especially if they surmounted it. I will keep CommentLuv for a couple of weeks to see how it works out, but have a feeling that I might have to revert to the default Blogger/Google facility. At least it's not Google+ though.
