Comments: Blogger vs Disqus

I spent quite a bit of time this past Saturday evening trying to figure out why a comment from a cousin who found me via my blog isn't showing up on a blog post. I blog on Blogger, and I use Disqus for commenting. I get email notifications from both Blogger and Disqus when someone leaves a comment. Even though I can reply via the Disqus email notification, I like to go to the blog post to reply.

On Saturday, when my cousin left a comment, I only got an email notification from Blogger. This has happened once before. When it happened the first time, I couldn't figure out what was wrong, so I left a comment to that person that I did see his comment, but for whatever reason, it didn't show up on the blog post. When it happened for the second time this past Saturday, I was determined to figure out what was going on and what I could do to prevent this from happening again. I was sure it was something that I needed to tweak.

Here is a screen shot of my comments counter on Blogger for the post Breaking News! Ruel RulonEscapes from France! where my cousin commented on Saturday (click on the image for a larger view). It says that I have eight comments. (The date is the date the post was published.)

Both the comment and my reply show in my Comments list on Blogger:

But when you go to the blog post itself, Disqus says there are six comments, not eight. The one my cousin left as well as my reply aren't showing at all in the comments at the bottom of the post. 

I didn't want my cousin to think I was ignoring him/her, so I tried using the Blogger email notification to reply. Not sure if my cousin received it, though.

After Googling (always the first thing I do) and looking around on disqus.com for a solution, I finally found out what the problem was. If you use Blogger and have the Mobile Template activated (which I do), then when someone comments on your blog post using a mobile device, it bypasses Disqus and goes to Blogger. In addition, comments made via mobile devices are only visible on mobile devices, and comments made on computers are only visible on computers. (I don't know if this is a problem on other blogging platforms.)

In the article "Why are comments being posted to Blogger instead of Disqus?" Disqus offers three solutions to this problem. Since I didn't want to disable commenting on mobile devices or disable the Mobile Template, I opted for the third option, to manually enable Disqus in the Blogger Mobile Template. I followed their instructions and went back to look at the post on my Android. My cousin's comment and my reply are nowhere to be seen, yet the other six comments now show on the Mobile Template! 

In that same Disqus article that I linked to above, it says you can import any missing comments from Blogger, so I went through the steps and received this message:

Then I decided to click on "system status." Great. They're having problems importing:

Now what? I'm afraid that I'm going to lose contact with a "newly found" cousin because of this. Maybe he/she received my email reply. I'll just have to wait to see what happens. I like using Disqus for comments, although I've read on the web that some folks hate it and won't leave a comment on blogs that use it. I've also read that if I get rid of Disqus, I'll lose all of my comments. I'll have to research this some more and give it some more thought.

Note: I typed the above this past Monday (3/18/13). I decided this morning to check one more time on the blog post about Ruel Rulon before I published this post to see if the comment my cousin made and my reply showed up. They did! Yay! All comments are on the mobile version, too. Another lesson learned.

Catherine