UPDATE: Wow, that was something. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Spot.IM was not prepared for the volume of comments we receive on this site. If you missed the action, we learned that “realtime updating you apparently can’t turn off” is not a good fit for The A.V. Club.
But that was the idea: Put this thing through its paces. And you all did that in spades—thank you so much for taking the time. We’re going to remove the Spot.IM thread on this page and replace it with a Disqus thread. (We’ll still have all the feedback you left, though.) Please feel free to use the Disqus comments—which I bet don’t look so bad now—to provide any further feedback you might have about the Spot.IM experiment and, for that matter, to share your concerns about commenting tech in general. We still think the Spot.IM people are good people, and we’ll continue our conversations on every front to find the best solution for the site.
Your passion and enthusiasm always floors me, and I’m pretty sure it floored Spot.IM today. Thanks again. This was a hilarious but useful exercise!
Hello everybody, John Teti here, your editor-in-chief. A.V. Club readers have had many wonderful conversations on our Disqus comment system, and our community continues to thrive. But while the discussions in the comment threads are often excellent, the technology that enables those discussions is sometimes not. That’s why we’ve been exploring alternatives for some time, and one option—from an ambitious startup called Spot.IM—has proven promising enough that we want to see what you think.
To that end, this Newswire page has Spot.IM enabled, rather than Disqus, so you can try it out and give us your impressions, right here in the same newfangled comments you’re commenting on—convenient! (Note: Although this is just a test run, the Spot.IM account you create in the thread below will be a real, full-fledged Spot.IM account, and it will remain in effect if we ultimately do switch over. But in that event, you can either change your username or start a whole new account. And I’m sure the Spot.IM folks would be happy to sort out any username weirdness/conflicts/whatever.)
I’ll be in the comment threads myself for a while, making note of your thoughts and answering questions as best I can. (Warning: My answer might be “I don’t know yet…” on some fronts.) We’re also joined by Lee, Shani, and Roy from Spot.IM itself, and they can field your questions and comments about the product. Let’s give our guests a warm reception.
Your reactions will not only help us figure out which platform is best for A.V. Club users, but it might also help shape the Spot.IM product if we decide to use it: The company’s developers are very responsive, and they may be able to tweak the product based on our readers’ feedback. That, frankly, is the way it ought to work, and it’s one reason why we see promise in the Spot.IM offering. For instance, we have a lot of ideas for improved moderation (read: minimizing trolls/harassment) that are impossible to execute with our current rudimentary tools. In any case, keep in mind that if you have suggestions about the product, Spot.IM may be able to actually take action on them—crazy, I know.
Okay, let’s take this thing for a spin.