In response to this post, I wrote ...
Uh, huh. Before you start releasing new features, how about fixing the pre-existing features that are already broken? Like the one that supposedly allows one to link from one's Disqus profile, to one of a limited number of other locations where one might have a presence, such as one's Google profile. I invite anybody reading this to go take a look at my Disqus profile, on which I had such a link installed, just a short while ago. Notice how it doesn't actually link to anywhere on google.com, but instead, pointlessly takes the visitor back to the Disqus profile he just left, after making him wait for a few moments while the profile loads?
As a user, I would have been happy to fix that, manually, and replace the wrong url (the one taking the visitor back to where he just was, after clicking on the link), but I can't, because your system won't let me, because who knows what evil things I might do if such power was to fall into my hands. Like I might link to somebody else's Google profile, and having my traffic go over to his sites, instead of to mine. Why would I do that? I don't know, but as soon as I can figure out what I or anybody else could achieve by doing this, I bet it will be diabolical.
Or, how about our comment feeds? Remember those,
http://www.disqus.com/
where username is the user's username? Take a look at the links on those feeds. If one views those links anywhere but on one's own profile, they lead to malformed urls taking one nowhere. Here's an example from Nabraj's feed, which can be found at
http://www.disqus.com/Nabraj/
See the link marked
Instead of leading to
http://www.crunchgear.com/
as it should, it instead takes the reader to this deserted spot on the Internet Superhighway
http://www.disqus.com/Nabraj/(
and abandons him on the side of the road. Disqus' "solution" to this problem would seem to be to have removed the RSS icons, instead of fixing the RSS feeds, and why not? It's much easier to sound like you know what you're doing if you say "we no longer support that feature" than it is to do so, while trying to explain why the darned thing still isn't fixed, and your users have to post guides to how to unmangle the urls for the links in your feeds, when their fed into sidebars on blogs and into RSS readers on other sites.
You know what? If you're trying to make your money by getting clueless investors into an overexcited mood by talking about all of the awesome things you're going to do, so they'll bid up your stock, you'll eventually run out of scatterbrained trustifarians to snooker. It's not a sustainable business strategy, as large numbers of former Yahoo employees and disgusted Yahoo end users will tell you.
If, on the other hand, you want to earn a good reputation, you folks need to start acting like adults, and getting one thing done before setting out to do another. Enthusiasm is fun, no doubt, but it doesn't get anything of value done without a little bit of responsibility to go with it. What a shame that you forgot that, assuming that you ever knew it, in the first place.
