Livefyre out. Back to Vanilla commenting system.

Livefyre commenting system promises to make a revolution in blogs by managing their comments with many benefits:

• more discussion thanks to real-time
• more comments and feedback thanks to an easier login mechanism
• and more trust, with a reputation system accross all blogs

Despite these nice ideas, it has several drawbacks

• you depend on another site. It can be down or slow.
• you can’t manage user accounts any more
• the real time technology is likely to be blocked in most companies by their firewalls
• log in can only be done via what Livefyre provides, i.e. Facebook connect and twitter. Facebook is blocked in many companies and everybody doesn’t have a twitter account.
• the thread level is not backed-up in WordPress. The day you quit Livefyre, you lose the hierarchy of the discussion. And some formatting too.
• it is not open-source software.

That’s why I’m back to Vanilla WordPress comments.

However, I think it’s good to see who posts, and I have disabled anonymous comments. And I try to make login as smooth as possible. I think OpenID is good, but it needs to be done properly, otherwise you end up like 37signals.

I made a hack on my WordPress theme, in order to have a « one-click » login.

< ?php elseif ( get\_option('comment\_registration') && !$user_ID ) : // If registration required and not logged in. ?>

<div id="comment_login" class="messagebox">
  < ?php //regis hack for smooth login if (function_exists('rpx_configured') && rpx_configured() ) { $login_link="javascript:showRPX('rpxlogin');"; printf (rpx_small_buttons()); } // existing code elseif (function_exists('wp_login_url')) { $login_link = wp_login_url(get_permalink()); } else { $login_link = get_option('siteurl') . '/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . urlencode(get_permalink()); } ?><br /> < ?php printf(__('You must be <a href="%s">logged in to post a comment.’, &lsquo;inove’), $login_link); ?> </div> 
  
  <p>

</p>

As a result, unknown users the the comment box like this.

When they click the icons or follow he link they have the <a href=/blog/2010/10/fini-les-mots-de-passe-sur-wordpress/">Janrain engage login box, like before</a>. My hack simply removes the login page.