Cocomment red x syndrome? |
Ok, whomever has put the hex on me, please take it off. Uncle! Uncle!
Since discovering Cocomment a month ago I’m still using on/off and like many others enjoying its usefulness. One thing I’ve noticed recently is a red x showing up when I go to comment on some blogs like TechCrunch and even this one intermittently:
When this red x is through the name cocomment requires entering in more information, which I did. Unfortunately, it keeps asking for this information. No way is this something I’ll continue to use very much if I keep having to fill out this form after I’ve already filled out a comment form. A CAPTCHA or one word verification field would be fine to help keep out the bots, but multiple form fields I’ve already filled being used again? No way. Is this just a glitch?
CoComment is still in beta. I’ve already notified them of this error via their contact form and will report back my findings, unless somebody from their organization stops by the comments here first.
Anybody else using this know what might be causing this and, more importantly, how to stop it from happening? Guess my glitch filled week continues. If I come anywhere near your website right now, do. Not. Let. Me. Touch. Anything.
Update 3/5/2006 5:40am PST: Nicolas from cocomment support has responded to my ticket. Here is what he said in part about this issue:
I know this is not convenient and we are working on solutions to make it better, at least not having to repeat the action as you say. For the moment, only the blog owner can prevent it by specifying to coComment the required info.
http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=37 (ex with wordpress: http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/?p=21)But as mentioned here above, we will bring you other solutions.
I noticed that those solutions require putting code in the comments template which I’m not that comfortable doing because then every comment will be sent to cocomment (yes/no?), even from commenters who aren’t signed up. They may not want their comments aggregated and should I just assume it’s ok and add the code to aggregate their comments onto a third party site? I wouldn’t have a problem doing it with one of our own sites, but sending off to another site without disclosing this is what’s happening makes me pause.
Lastly, none of this explains why it worked fine earlier and doesn’t work any longer. There are links to forum threads with other cocomment users complaining about this issue. Hopefully they will bring us other solutions because muddying up the templates doesn’t seem like a very good answer to me. And they will never get the vast majority of blogs out there doing that anyway. All the information they need (blog title, post title, permalink, etc) is provided in the comments RSS feed, they should just be able to spider it from there.
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There’s a good chance you deleted a cookie and/or are blocking it from putting a cookie on your system. Without the cookie, it can’t remember who you are…so it keeps asking you to fill out the form.
Comment by Dan — March 4, 2006 @ 4:00 pm PST
Nope, Dan, look at the screenshot carefully because I’m actually logged in and teh red X is still showing. It works on some sites — and sometimes even on this site — and pops up at other times. Testing with this post using my Mac and the red X is shown here too. Clearly something is amiss.
Comment by TDavid — March 4, 2006 @ 4:48 pm PST
It’s not just TDavid — it started happening to me today, too. I think it must be a glitch in coComment. The only change I’ve made since it last worked was to install the Sage RSS reader for Firefox. You didn’t happen to do that, too, did you TDavid?
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 4, 2006 @ 9:09 pm PST
Nope, but I’m seeing on their forums other people complaining about it, so it’s apparently not an isolated user issue.
See these official cocomment threads …
Older, but revived and confirmed by two other users today:
http://www.cocomment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=184
New thread today:
http://www.cocomment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=228
Whatever the bug is let’s hope they squash it because no way am I going to enter in all those extra fields every time.
Comment by TDavid — March 5, 2006 @ 1:00 am PST
And btw no, Sterling, I didn’t install Sage.
Comment by TDavid — March 5, 2006 @ 1:01 am PST
I don’t understand the business value of things like cocomment. Isn’t there a strong incentive for blog engines themselves to provide a feed for comments? There is no technology barrier here. As soon as the leading blog engines add it, I wonder what might happened to services like cocomment.
Comment by Mike — March 5, 2006 @ 10:01 am PST
It’s all about eyeballs, Mike. You get blog owners spending time at your service you have b2b sales opportunities. That’s where cocomment seems to be targeting. However they will have a hard time getting site owners to use their service for saving time with bugs like the one described herein. They have indicated to me that they are working on this and hopefully it will be resolved soon.
Comment by TDavid — March 5, 2006 @ 10:37 am PST
one more thing, mike. cocomment allows you to track all of YOUR comments, no matter what site they’re posted on. A feed for one blog’s comments doesn’t do that for you. I could maybe think of ways to do this better than they have, but it is a need.
ah ha! the red x is gone!
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 6, 2006 @ 1:05 pm PST
Is it true? Yes it is! woohoo — no more red x
Comment by TDavid — March 6, 2006 @ 3:01 pm PST
I would recomend co.mments.com. This service will show all comments on all the posts you care about, not just the one’s who use the same tool like cocomment. I tried both but prefer to have an rss feed of all the comments on a post. http://co.mments.com
Comment by Steven Frein — March 6, 2006 @ 3:25 pm PST
TDavid,
yes we were working on the problem and coComment now works again on your blog, so no more red x!
It should be even better as you can now tag you comments to help you organize your conversations.
And as mentioned in our blog, we will also provide you soon with the possibility to get all comments ad now only those of coComment users.
TDavid, Sorry again for the inconvenience last week-end.
icolas
Comment by nicolasD — March 6, 2006 @ 4:58 pm PST
Steven — I like co.mments.com! I like the fact that you can bookmark the conversation at any time, not just when submitting. I’ll use this in parallel with cocomment for a while and see what works best for me. Thanks!
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 6, 2006 @ 5:54 pm PST
Thanks for the tip, Steven, I’ll give that one a try too
Comment by TDavid — March 6, 2006 @ 7:01 pm PST
More comments about comments, linked back to this post
http://www.chipstips.com/microblog/index.php/post/117/
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 8, 2006 @ 4:17 pm PST
[…] I know others have left over the problems but I’ve stayed with cocomment. I also signed up with their competitor co.mments and have used their bookmarklet a few times, but I’m sort of loyal in a way to those swiss guys who brought us to the dance. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Comment tracking competition, MAMP and WAMPANY development — April 8, 2006 @ 9:54 am PST
I sense some confusion here which I’d like to address, even though this was written some time ago.
Blog integration (the thing you do by adding stuff to your template) means that all comments by people *currently identified by coComment* (ie, logged in) will be recorded. As of now, coCo does not track comments by non-members.
To be able to capture a comment, coCo needs to be able to understand the comment form currently being used. As there are no standards out there for designing a comment form, coCo has had to “learn” the most popular comment forms out there. You get the little green check next to your name when coCo has happily managed to get all the data it needed from the comment form and page.
If some of the data is missing (usually because the blog itself isn’t marked up in a way that coCo understands) you get the little red cross. By clicking on the username and through this pop-up window you’re talking about, you can manually provide coCo with the missing information it needs.
As for why it worked fine and then stopped working, I can only guess that a change was made to how coCo interprets comments, and that it caused a momentary incompatibility with your blog.
Hope this clarifies things a little!
Comment by Steph — April 15, 2006 @ 3:45 am PST
Steph - never too late to address a problem
I think it’s flawed design if it requires people to edit their templates in order for it to work globally. With co.mments this never happens but with cocomments it happens somewhat frequently. Sometimes I’ll take the time and fill out the stupid form and other times say forget it. Particularly annoying when cocomment can’t even remember me filling out the form and asks me again for the same blog and the same post.
The red x problem is annoying to users and caused at least one person to say they switched away. And the problem wasn’t “momentary” it lasted for a couple days and there were threads on the cocomment forum with many other cocomment users complaining about the problem.
I see you took a job as an evangelist for cocomment? That’s good, but I wouldn’t advise trying to resuscitate threads like this one where cocomment is still broken unless there truly is a sensible solution and fix. Doesn’t seem to be one yet
Comment by TDavid — April 15, 2006 @ 9:49 am PST
co.mments uses a crawling system, meaning it pulls the comments on a regular basis to check for new ones. That’s great because it gives you all the comments and doesn’t rely that much on the markup structure. It’s less great because of scaling issues.
I agree the pop-up should remember if you’ve already filled info for the same blog/post, I’ll see if that can be made to happen. The red X in itself isn’t really a problem, it’s an indication that coCo needs extra info to capture the comment.
If you have an unflawed design solution to work around the fact that comment markup varies greatly, and which will scale, do let us know
Comment by Steph — April 15, 2006 @ 10:42 am PST
Interesting answer, Steph, if you are serious anyway.
The programmer side of me — that’s my business, BTW — says this is an inapproriate place to ask me for programming advice (is that what you are trying to do above or just kidding with the smiley?). If you’re serious then look me up on my programming business site directly where a programming solution could be seriously explored.
As for the user side of me …
The user side says this request is totally ill-advised. Scaling isn’t a user concern. Don’t do the program if you can’t figure out the backend scaling situation. Don’t come to the user and ask them to help you figure out how to make your program work. Backend design issues aren’t the user’s problem. Sorry if that’s blunt but that’s the way it is.
Users want solutions that work — period. Yours doesn’t in its current incarnation 100% or even 70% of the time. Heck, I’d say it’s a 50/50 proposition at best.
Here’s another problem. You fill out the cocomment form, everything is entered, get the green ok and then it won’t submit the comment: screenshot. Waste of time.
Sometimes I seriously wonder if the cocomments folks lab tested anything. I’m not the only one experiencing these issues and they seem like rather severe bugs to me. The whole point of your program is to make it easy to track comments which more often than not it is anything but that unless the blog owner edits their template? That’s a failed proposition, sorry.
Like I said in the last entry, this probably isn’t a road you want to continue going down if you truly don’t have any solutions. If/when you do, please return with an update.
This reply may come across as rude, but my intention is to tell you that I’m a frustrated cocomment user. I’ve been loyal up to this point and kept using your service but I’m seriously considering just deleting the bookmarklet and saying goodbye like others I know have already done.
Comment by TDavid — April 15, 2006 @ 11:53 am PST
And as for this: “You get the little green check next to your name when coCo has happily managed to get all the data it needed from the comment form and page.”
Wrong. See the screenshot. It doesn’t work sometimes even after the information has been entered and the green check is showing.
Fix this, please.
Comment by TDavid — April 15, 2006 @ 12:02 pm PST
TDavid: not here to pick fights, sorry if I came across like that. When did you get the error message you describe in the screenshot? I mean, this is something which is happening now, correct? Using the extension, the greasemonkey script, or the bookmark?
Thanks for the info.
Comment by Steph — April 15, 2006 @ 7:12 pm PST
Bookmarklet. Calacanis.com blog and several others. No matter what you do it keeps popping up that stupid box you see in the screenshot.
Fix this, please.
Comment by TDavid — April 15, 2006 @ 8:21 pm PST
I remember there was a period in March when this happened all the time, but lately I seem to be OK, say 96 per cent of the time. Like you, I have found the same problem: with some Moveable Type blogs, it was OK six weeks ago, and not OK now.
I, too, have the same problem with Jason Calacanis’ blog—I can see the blog name and subject (together, rather than separate) and the permalink, but that’s it.
For me, I’ll stick to coCo for the time being; I could not figure how to get Co.mments to work, and 96 out of a 100 in beta is tolerable though not ideal—especially with blogs that worked before but do not any more.
Comment by Jack Yan — April 15, 2006 @ 10:46 pm PST