Can't Comment? Please Tell Us.

Hi. Editor Seth here.

We got a friendly tip from an anonymous reader yesterday that reads:

Dear Seattlest- your comments function sucks. Wondering why so few people sign in to post comments? Because it's impossible to register for a login.

Thanks for letting us know. We don't want to have a sucky comments function. It is our strong desire to avoid suckiness in all things.

Our corporate overlords recently changed the comments system because comment spam was overwhelming our servers. And, as with any change to any system, there are bugs a-plenty, I'm sure.

But--we can't desuckify if we don't know what precisely what the problem is. These things can come and go--for example, I tried to register today using an alias and it worked just fine.

So--if you try to register to comment and can't, please email me at kolloen via the gmail service, and let me know what happened.

Details like what browser you were using, the error message you got, and anything else you consider pertinent are very helpful.

If you'd rather explain your problem anonymously, please feel free to do so either as a guest in the comments, or if that doesn't work, in the aforementioned tips section.

And thanks, anonymous tipper, for the heads-up.

Peace and barnacles,

Editor Seth

Contact the author of this article or email tips@seattlest.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Seth in Miscellaneous on July 25, 2007 8:50 AM

Comments [rss]

guest

Lemme clarify by saying I firmly believe that at least one of them must have been me registering at some point.

guest

It's also rather strange that there doesn't appear to be a "forgot your password?" link. All usernames I would use and typically do use are supposedly in use.

Troy Morris

I was being sarcastic. Perhaps we should make a sarcastic signal.

I signed up the first day or two, so I don't really have details, but I think it went fine. It was confusing for a second or two being taken to the Gothamist- mostly because it's the NYC blog named after a fictional comic book city.

Don't get me wrong, some improvements probably could be made, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Some really cool things could happen with profiles and the logging in, though. Worth a brainstorm by the Corporate Overlords.

dawdler

registering was a royal pain. it was very confusing. it was a while back so unfortunately i can't be as specific as you probably want. i seem to remember the navigation being very confusing, being taken to Gothamist -- which was confusing -- and just having it be a very clunky and navigationally disorienting process.

i actually gave up a few times.