Thursday, August 02, 2007

CoComment - Good grief!

I have been using CoComment for some time now - ever since I became too active a commenter to be able to remember all the places I had left comments. There have been a few hiccups along the way (some of which have been sorted out) and it isn't always reliable: sometimes it neglects to let me know that a conversation has continued since I last looked and sometimes it tells me there are new comments in my conversations when in fact there aren't. Nevertheless, it's been better than nothing.

Until today.

The front end has completely changed. The "my conversations" page has become really busy and I no longer have any idea how to tell which of the conversations listed have been updated recently and which have not. I've tried using the "Mark as read" option, only to have the conversation disappear off the list altogether, so I can't see how/if it differs from an unread conversation. It only lists 5 conversations instead of the previous, well, lots! The design of the "explore the community" section of the page really sucks (unless of course, it just looks that way in Firefox... wouldn't be the first time I'd had that problem).

Oh, and there's a spelling error right on the top of the page: "stop traking this conversation" And when I do stop "traking" the conversation I don't have a link to take me back to the list of conversations.

Bleagh! Can anyone suggest an alternative?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Karyn: Thanks for using coComment. We understand every change takes a bit of getting used to and we do hear you about the display of My Conversation ... we'll take that into consideration. We've added significant new functionalities to the service that give users more flexibility. We encourage you to check some of these out and as always , we appreciate your feedback. Thanks! The coComment Team

Cammy Bean said...

I had problems with CoComment when I switched to FireFox from IE, so I abandoned it. Now I'm using co.mments, which works pretty well (when I to remember to click the button on my toolbar to track a conversation, that is).

UI is pretty simple and it appears to track the things I ask it to, and correctly.

http://co.mments.com

Harold Jarche said...

I use Blogfux's Commentful, because I also use MapStats.

Karen Janowski said...

Agree with you! I can't even get it to open anymore to see the comments that are being tracked. Great concept, terrible product. Very frustrating.

Anonymous said...

OK, we heard you !

We've made a change today to retain the new design (cleaner/more functionality) whilst going back to the 'old' simplicity in the conversation tracking.

Let us know what you think please :-)

Cheers,

Matt (coComment CEO)

PS. You can email me at matt@cocomment.com

Anonymous said...

I was really impressed with the CoComment team's alertness to the criticism and really wanted to be able to go back and say, "Actually, it's not so bad, ionce you figure out how it works, and just see how they respond to their users' requirements." However, either no-one else has commented on the posts on which I have commented recently, or something is well adn truly broken. I still haven't figured out how to tell which posts have received new comments... :-(

Anonymous said...

Karyn -

Thanks for your understanding! In the last few days, we've been working really hard to fix some of the bugs. Here is a quick update on progress with V2 Beta to date ...

1. coComment Client: we've reverted to using Version 1.0 Client everywhere except on the sidebar, so you should not have more site compatibility issues or errant buttons
2. Database fix: a corruption of our database was discovered and we have now resolved this
3. MyConversations: we reverted to ‘old’ accordion expanding design as preferred by user base, but in new look and feel
4. Sidebar/Launcher/New coCobar: is being modified in response to user feedback (please let us know if you have more feedback)

Again, we apologize unreservedly for any problems you’ve encountered. We are working flat out to resolve all problems as fast as we possibly can and we think, realistically, that coComment will once again be stable by the end of this week.

Feel free to contact me at kristina@cocomment.com if you have any questions or feedback ... I'd be happy to help! Kristina

srah said...

"Traking" makes me want to scream, too. It's such a TINY, MINOR fix! Of all the complaints I have about coComment 2.0 this is the tiniest, but because they haven't fixed it, it just keeps growing and growing in my eyes. It would do so much to appease me if they would just add a C already!

Anonymous said...

Srah - so glad I'm not the only one. It's like: aargh!

Anonymous said...

We'll get it done for the next release this week.

Matt.

srah said...

They added the C!