Fresh out the box, WordPress comments just are not enough for me. I don’t want someone to have to fill out any extra forms to comment, especially when I despise doing that myself. It is not like this place is some hotbed of conversation so I can understand if people would see extra work to do and just walk away.  So I had to search for a solution that would make it easy for everyone.

Some geniuses who got to WP before me had this grand idea of hacking at the code and making the comments better. Apparently that just plain sucked, because I can’t seem to find very much info about those guys.  Now we have two options: a bunch of plugins, or a third party comment system.

Going the plugin route is a great idea for tons of people. I have seen many a post about the tons of comment plugins people use on their websites and they actually look fantastic. They offer great customization and provide a fairly unique experience for your visitors. There are just some folks  in the world that don’t like having a big pile of plugins, and this is not a good option.

The smart minds that came up with the third party comment systems showed up right on time to save the day.  Fantastic comments with just a single plugin and they get to do all the behind the scenes work. Everyone smiled.  Then there were more features added, which started to weigh this option down a bit.

Like most folks who use them, when I first tried out the commenting systems I did not really notice the slightly slower load times. I was just happy my comment areas were more open and snazzier looking.  As time passed, the sites started coming up slower and there were more conflicts with other things on the sites.  Frustrated, I tried different comment systems only to have the same problems crop up.

During the course of time dealing with these issues,  I had acquired a decent amount of knowledge about the behind the scenes of a website and decided it was time to take a peek at the code.  It was not pretty.  I was appalled at the fact that there were teams of people that came up with these comment systems, yet they could not run their code through a validator before they put it out to market.  Sure they are mostly free services, but there are some that cost something that have the same problems. *cough*Echo*cough*

This made we go back to the default WP comments, which lead to an onslaught of ugly and spam. I longed for the lazy times, but the support for fixing the issues was lacking and I did not want to delve into the code on my own.  Reluctantly I eventually returned to the comment system and resolved to clean it up when I got the chance. After a few hours of guesstimation, I fixed most of the code issues in the comment system used here – XHTML is valid, CSS mostly cleaned up.

But why did I have to do that when there are people there who are paid to make the thing work? I am happy to share the cleaned up version of the plugin when I am done if anyone wants it,  but I still hate the fact that I had to fix it. I implore you folks that work on these things for a living to clean up your code a little bit. Since you guys know the ins and outs of it, it should not take more than a few minutes to dot the i’s on these issues.