Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

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.