Ouch.

Haloscan, that blog commenting software that has been around for years, is closing the service. This is from their website.

Haloscan, the legacy comment system that JS-Kit acquired last year, is physically starting to fail (the software and hardware). In order to minimize the disruption for users and avoid a hard stop, we have worked hard to provide two ways to transition off the system.

This transition will happen in batches of users over the course of a couple of months. The first batch of users will start getting a notice of the upgrade right away on their Haloscan admin dashboard.

Once presented with the upgrade message, Haloscan users will have 2 weeks to make a decision. You will have the following two options.

1. Upgrade to Echo for a 30 day free Trial and then $12/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically. Read below for important information about Echo.
2. Export your Haloscan comment data and turn off their service – Haloscan comment importers are on the way from various vendors.

If you do not choose a specific path within the 2 weeks notice, you will be upgraded to the Echo trial automatically.

Haloscan was very popular with Blogger, since Blogger’s commenting functions are woefully inadequate (even after a few small tweaks by Google). I tried Haloscan a few years ago, and wasn’t too impressed. Of course, the Blogger commenting functions are terrible. But rather than continue to work with Blogger, I just went to Wordpress and my own self-hosted blogs. It’s been a great experience, with Wordpress.

Regarding Haloscan, some bloggers are afraid they may lose all their comments across hundreds of posts. I *think* Haloscan is offering a free comment migration back to your original blog host, through various third-party vendors. Not sure, though, because it seems some things are still up in the air. Read the FAQs here.

Haloscan is closing February 20.

Tags: Blogger, blogs, comments, Haloscan