Why we pulled the Echo commenting facility

Keith Adams  

JS-Kit echo comments
JS-Kit Echo comments

Regular readers of AROnline will have no doubt noticed that the Echo commenting system has been pulled from the AROnline Live Blogs and News pages of the website. 

I have been using Echo elsewhere on the website for a while now and have been very happy with it but certain limitations have come to light, which make using it on the WordPress area of the site too much of a compromise.

I’ve found that the order in which comments are displayed can’t be reversed at the server end and calling an external server (where the user comments are sited) slows down page refresh performance considerably – with that in mind, I’ve disabled the feature after a test period of a couple of weeks.

That’s a shame really, as having all comments in one place is probably a very good thing – especially as we continue to put thought into moving AROnline onto a more up to date platform. Importing two sets of comments into a new system will always be more of a pain than one, but there you go – the joys of web integration.

However, that’s going to be a while off – Drupal looks like our favoured new platform (for many, boring reasons), but I’m really hoping that we can automate moving HTML pages over to a database system… the thought of copy/pasting 2000 static pages fills me with dread!

Keith Adams

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