Commenting By Email Is Back, Hopefully Better Than Ever

Last Updated on: 19th October 2017, 12:46 pm

If you’ve been coming here a while, perhaps you remember Echo. It was a really slick commenting system we used for a time back in our Blogger days until the folks that ran it decided to screw a bunch of us the hell over.

One of Echo’s best features was the ability to let you not only subscribe to comment notifications by email, but also reply to those emails to post comments in response without having to go back to the site over and over again. Since the incident, that’s always been a thing we’ve wanted to bring back, and today, I think we have.

We’re testing something called Replyable, and it would be cool if you’d help us out. So if you get a second, leave a comment on something, be sure to subscribe and then use the reply dealy in the messages you get to leave more comments and help us make sure this all works. If it does, maybe we can bring our poor comments section back to a happier time when it was a thing people actually wanted to use. Or maybe that’s a lofty goal and that time has passed. Either way, we’d still like to know if it works at all so we know whether to keep it around for those times when somebody shows up and is all like “oh hey, a comments section. Let’s roast these people.”

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23 Comments

  1. Alright. Jason from Replyable here. I’ll help give this wizbang a toss. Let me know if you have any questions. For real. I make Replyable.

    Oh. Ps. Your theme’s comment template is messing with the checkbox that people use to subscribe to comments. I thought this css would fix it…
    https://pastebin.com/raw/wupQPytk

    But… I still can’t actually check the checkbox. Something in the theme is messing with checkboxes. You might be able to solve it all with Epoch:
    http://wordpress.org/plugins/epoch

    Jason

    1. Thanks for stopping around to see how we’re doing, and for the info about the checkbox thing.  That’s something we would have never figured out purely on our own.  Carin and I are both blind and using screen readers, and the checkbox gives us no problems.

      1. Oh!! Ok. Well, the css I gave you doesn’t fix it entirely… but if you download and activate Epoch from the WordPress plugin repo that may solve the problem.

        We have a few other blind customers that very much love Replyable for the added email accessibility. I hope it works well for you as well!

        Jason

        1. Ok that’s weird. Either our email is spotty or the comments are coming in in a wacky order. I got this comment by email, but I never got your first one where you told us that we needed to tweak some stuff with the checkbox. Thanks again for letting us know, by the way. Hopefully it will be an easy fix.

          1. I’m still waiting for Jason’s first comment, and your first reply. Let’s hope they show up soon. But I guess it doesn’t matter because there’s always the recap. Yea recaps! Not complaining, just observing because we want to test the heck out of this.

          2. Hey Carin,

            Email is tricky. Depending on your provider things could arrive sooner or later than they should (depending if they are caught up in spam filters or otherwise). Also, you may not have gotten the first because I made it before you were done confirming your subscription.

            Keep an eye on it….

            Jason

      1. Not sure, but if I had to guess you could reply here, then go quickly to the site and fix it.  Not ideal.  Hopefully there’s a better way somewhere.  It’s not in the settings, nor is an answer to the sometimes you’re a name sometimes you’re a username conundrum.

    1. It worked. Not perfectly, but it worked. You can edit comments for five minutes after submitting them in a fucked up state now. Need to find a way to make that limitless.

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