Second thoughts on remotely-hosted comments

Second thoughts on remotely-hosted comments: after some mail from Hossein Sharifi, the author of YACCS, I’ve changed my tune. The problem with free remotely-hosted comments is not so much with the idea as it is with our expectations of them. Yes, Snorcomments crashing and burning, and taking all its users’ comments with it, was a bad thing. However, Blogback shutting off new signups was only a bad thing in that there wasn’t anyone else ready to take the next set of users. Blogback isn’t a tragedy, it’s a success. Its users are happy to have a stable comment provider (you are stable, aren’t you, Marcus?), and Marcus learned some things (my only goal in what I do online), used some bandwidth he wasn’t using, and made some people happy.

So where’s the problem? I think it’s in the way that Blogger makes us think in terms of a single provider. As Hossein said:

I think that the success of a web service relies on distribution of servers, control of growth, and cooperation between service providers. For the blog comment case, this would mean that the various services would share the ability to import/export a common file format, distribute users proportionately among themselves (giving more users to those with more resources), and reject new users when the entire system cannot support them.

All we need is a set of comment scripts, in PHP, Perl, and ASP at least, that are reasonably easy to install, and feature a standardized XML import/export feature. Then anyone who had some bandwidth going to waste and wanted the undying gratitude of a few hundred or a few thousand Blogger users could just install a script, set a limit on the number of users who can sign up, and list themselves on a central register of comment providers. If they need to shut down their service later, they would only need to give their users enough warning so that they could move to a new provider, telling their new host’s script to import their comments from http://oldhost.com/export/user=foo. It’s a beautiful idea, and I hope someone gets to work on it quickly, because I’m sure YACCS will be full before long.

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