Following up on Comment I posted to The Numbers of Disqus | Disqus: The Official Blog, I wrote
"I've since heard back from the people in Support, who weren't in the least way helpful. I've since had to post this piece of advice to visitors to my pages, when running the Disqus feed
"The Disqus feed is grossly malformed, the links taking you to urls that not only don't correspond to real locations, but which probably couldn't. Yes, I've written to the Disqus support staff about this. All that they were able or willing to do was read a script about how to set up a site on Disqus. That's all that they ever seem to do. Yes, this is pathetic, and it's a powerful argument against installing Disqus on one's own blog, but for the time being, Disqus is a popular system, so
what do we do?
Ask our patient visitors to do what automatic machinery should be doing for them, that's what. Treating the url as a string, going from left to right, delete everything up to and including the first single quote you see. Continue, leaving all symbols untouched, until you reach the second single quote. Starting at that single quote and going rightward until you run into the first close paranthese you see, remove the string that consists of that single quote, the close paranthese and everything in between. You now have the url that Disqus should have been putting on that feed, and didn't.
Congratulations. You are now an amateur automaton, having run what amounts to being a simple computer program. Are you wondering why some actual programmers aren't having the Disqus system do that, itself, given that it runs on an actual computer? If so, you are not alone in this."
To the staff at Disqus: Have you no pride in what you do? Do you wish to produce a product that is worth using, or are you only in the business of generating press releases?"
Some companies might, oh, I don't know ... deal with a breakdown in the system by trying to fix it? Disqus decided to go for spin control, instead, and I responded.
"What a very long way for us to have to go for you to still not get it. Or pretend that you're not getting it. Hard to be sure which.
"We removed the profile link from all Google profiles since we discovered that there was no way to pull in the correct link for the majority of profiles."
Yes. there. is. Let the user have the freedom to enter that url, himself. What is it about that concept that you have difficulty understanding? If you go to the entrance to the supermarket, and the door doesn't swing open, do you, the shopper, wait for the repairman to come fix the motion detector, or do you just push the door open, and go buy your groceries? Do you see where I'm going with this Tyler? Is it really that hard for you to understand the idea of letting people bypass the automation?
If you're tremendously afraid that somebody is going to do something evil with that link, whatever that might be, you could just have somebody enter an id into a form following the string
"http://profiles.google.com/"
and have the link go to http://profiles.google.com/(the id the user enters). You see, we have these things called "keyboards", and what's even more amazing is that nature gave us these things called "fingers". I used them when I was typing this message to you. They come in handy. Anyhow, and this is where it gets wild, you can use those finger things to type alphanumeric strings into forms, and if you really want to get fancy, even insert a little punctuation into them. You might think that it would take people years of trial and error to learn how to do this, what with there being no owner's manual for these fancy "fingers" I keep talking about, and compatibility issues given the lack of standardization in the manufacture of these items (which have been known to come in a wide variety of lengths and thicknesses), but in fact people pick up the concept, right away.
"Just in case you didn't get our last couple emails, here are instructions on how to set a link to a website in your Disqus profile (which in your case it sounds like you'd prefer to be a link to your Google profile"
Really, amazingly unperceptive. Follow link. Go to my profile. Notice that I already have a homepage link, so obviously I know how to set those, and no, I don't want my homepage link to go there. I want my Google link to go to my Google profile. How many times do we have to go around and around before you understand that really, really simple concept?
Now ask yourself what on Earth this any of this has with your canned response in which you tell me how to set up a website on Disqus, something that one absolutely does not have to do in order to set a homepage link? This is the worst user support I've ever seen. Not only do you read from a script, cluelessly, but you follow the user onto the company blog to do so, in public. Incredible.
Oh, and by the way, awesome job on bypassing the observation that your RSS feed is still broken, something else I've written to you about, only to get greeted with the usual form letter about how to set up a site on Disqus which, again, had absolutely nothing to do with what I had written to you, about."
Unbelievable. As usual, I'll be reposting some of what you see here as a comment below, in order to put it on my Disqus profile. While the first comment you saw quoted in this post sailed through, the second has been held up for moderation by a staff that doesn't seem to enjoy having people hear that their product has become a problem, which it has - for those of us posting comments to other people's blogs. We don't get to choose the system that somebody else uses.
The sad thing is that comment hosting would appear to be one of those inherently interesting ideas that is going to die in the market, not because people have lost interest in it, but because the interest has been beaten out of them, by the early entrance of bad participants into the marketplace. We have Haloscan, a few years ago, surprising its users by making comments of over a year old vanish, to be "held hostage" as I saw somebody put it, until the blog owner bought a premium membership. We have Typepad developing a relationship with the much (and justly) maligned Facebook - the company whose CEO took a position in a video interview that the cool kids didn't care about privacy - and changing its signup procedure so that one can't get a new free Typepad account without signing up for Facebook, and putting one's own privacy at risk. This means that if one has Typepad Connect installed on one's blog and somebody wants to post a comment to one of one's post, one is now, in effect, asking them to either sign up for two services instead of one (with one of those services being one that a lot of people don't want to have anything to do with), the free services having been bundled together as part of a package deal - take it or leave it. The only alternative is for the Typepad Connect user's visitor to pay for the privilege of getting to post his comments on the user's blog, something that the visitor is not likely to respond to in a positive way. Not that the visitor should.
The concept of comment moderation is wonderful. It ties so much of one's content posted elsewhere, together, and provides a natural web of connections between the different blogs, some of whose owners might otherwise have never have heard of each other. But what we're seeing out of the big services is terrible service, something that will and should deter blog owners from exploring the concept further. The sad thought is that someday, somebody will show up, ready and willing to provide this service in the competent and conscientious manner that companies like Disqus either can't or won't, and promptly go bankrupt trying, because people will have such bad memories of the service that they saw, that they won't be prepared to give the concept another chance. The demand will have been sabotaged by the supply.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Lassez-faire doesn't work. Life, by now, should have taught us this, even if our history teachers hadn't. We, as either customers or users, need to be able to count on the goods and services we have available to us to at least meet certain basic, minimum standards, if we are to dare to enter the marketplace, at all, and for that reason it is the proper role of government to enforce those standards. We forget this, and neocons and libertarians try to deny it, but there used to be something called "consumer protection legislation", and it got passed without the American people or anybody else being impoverished by it. We need that. We need to have the Government get involved in the Internet, because the Market isn't getting the job done.
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