Disqusted

Here's the plain truth of the matter: Eschaton's commenters are too numerous and are using Disqus in a way that is pretty obviously far too intensive for what the software was designed. That's probably been true of all three commenting systems Atrios has used over the eight years I've been there. He really seems to need something more akin to a chat program to handle the 3-10 comments per minute that typify average commenting traffic, there. Disqus would work fine on a blog like this one, but for one that slams that many comments down the pipe... I just don't know that Disqus will ever have the muscle to pull it off. I'd be happy to be wrong, though, as it seems Atrios is completely uninterested in changing commenting systems anytime soon.

That being said, it seems that the good folx at Disqus would have stats on the heaviest users, and I can easily imagine A-man's place being in the top 5% for Disqus usage. Perhaps for that reason, some of us have been getting good, or at least timely responses from the Disqus team, filing our gripes via Twitter (@DISQUS). The big issue is real-time updating, which for days, has suffered from very intermittent functionality (tonight for example, it seems to work for perhaps 10-minute stretches at a time, then "takes a break" for 15 minutes or so). Add in the fact that one has to re-activate real-time updating after every refresh, and it just gets awfully bad from the user experience standpoint.

Why that is so annoying to those of us who are not Disqus developers -- who likely don't try to follow the comments at Eschaton -- seems straightforward enough -- they haven't tried refreshing the page, which reloads slowly because of all the crap Atrios needs to load on us to make a buck off the site. And they probably haven't "use-cased" their own software for this, noticing that when real-time updating goes away, even briefly, the necessity of refreshing the page means that nested replies often go unnoticed, as they nest WAY upthread in the case of replies to comments that were made more than just a few minutes ago. That makes the "real-time" experience into a bit of a joke, ala JS-Kit's Echo product. Needles, meet big-ass haystack!

So, if I were an enterprising Disqus employee, knowing that a new ground-up version was due to be released, I would study the logs of Eschaton's usage, and determine if the new version of the product would amaze and astound the Eschaton commenting community. Because we're loud. And not going away. And the best, most-patient frickin' commenting system beta-testers in the universe. And if the new version seemed unlikely to amaze and astound the Eschaton community, I'd go one step further, and try to find a product to recommend to Atrios that would be a better fit. Because that's what firms who care about their reputation try to do -- "Hey, I can't meet your needs, but check out this firm... it's a potential better fit for you."

Food for thought, Disqus?
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