Echo sucks even harder

It's unbelievable what a bunch of crooks these Echo people are. Just to recap on the original beef. Echo took over Haloscan, the comment system used by many bloggers. They took away some of the functionality and charged people $12 a year for what had been free or had involved, in my case, a lifetime subscription of $12. The rub was that if you went elsewhere you could well lose all of your past comments. And, as I said, there was reduced functionality.

Well now the first year is nearly up and they are demanding a new payment. I was loath to pay but what can you do? So I clicked on the "renew now" button and it turns out that the shysters are now demanding $10 a month minimum for their crap service that has lost us, at Jews sans frontieres, a great many comments.

Anyway, not wishing to leave any hostages to fortune or anything but we, at JSF, don't intend to take this lying down. We are considering a migration to Disqus but the high level of customisation at JSF, unlike here, means that we could lose old comments or we may have to ditch some of the additions to the blog over the six years that it's been running.

I googled Echo sucks recently and high on the list came Dr Dawg's Blawg, which had just run a post with that title.  I went back there just now and they are migrating their comments.  All their old comments are gone and they have had to change template in their attempt to restore the old comments.  I wish them luck and I'll be checking up on their progress.

I'll be wishing us luck too.  But I can't believe these people can get away with what they have done to those of us who paid the lifetime sub.... It's bad enough what they've done, period.  As Dr Blawg says, we've beta-tested their crap system for a year now and this is how we get repaid.  Disqus works fine here.  Hopefully it will work equally fine at Jews sans frontieres when we move.