When dealing with Blogger posts, both Haloscan and Echo would reference Blogger IDs. However, if you wish to export your comments, someone in their infinite wisdom decided that (to keep Haloscan customers enslaved to their system), they would only export MD5 hashes of corresponding Blogger IDs for your old comments through Haloscan.

So, anyone who was with Haloscan, and wishes to leave Echo, is now left with an export file of useless information that no system will import, and which will cause you to go through all of your old comments, and republish them manually.

I really like *all* the options out there right now, including Echo, but none of them at present will import my comments. Why? Because the existing comments are threaded (in the simplest way possible … each comment has a parent comment ID, if/when applicable) and because I have images people have posted with their comments that also need to be imported into the new system. So, no one does this right now, at least as far as I know. But if anyone has a lead, now or later, please, please let me know.

Is there any other commenting service that will consolidate Facebook & Twitter comments onto your blog like JS-Kit? That’s the selling feature for me as I get a couple of comments (sometimes none) on my blog, but ALWAYS get tons of comments on Facebook &/or Twitter. I’d love to be able to integrate the 3, but I don’t know that I have the know-how to deal with the back-end problems.

I just installed JS-Kit Echo a couple days ago and prefer it over the comment system available on Blogger. I run IE7 and WinXP and have not had any lock up issues – yeah, that would be a deal breaker.

I love the moderation options on Echo – I can have newcomers or known PITA’s comments held for moderation, but I can also approve known commenters on their first post for no future moderation . My site doesn’t get a lot of comment traffic so the live commenting isn’t a big selling point, but on high traffic sites that would really be great. I also like the comment editor and smileys.

They’ve done an excellent job of making the transition to Blogger seamless. All of my previous comments transferred and correcting known issues (such as needing to have your Blogger comments set to “Allow anyone to comment”) are spelled out, step by step. Set up for other blog hosts or self hosted sites might not be quite so well documented and easy – I don’t know.

I had tried both Intense Debate and Disqus and ended up removing both – one didn’t transfer my comments, and the other one had code that was rejected by Blogger when I tried to insert it into my template, and I’m not code-savvy enough to correct those kinds of problems.

Is that what you settled on?

I have to say Disqus reactions are very unreliable, missing quite a few.

Backtype and Ubervu also seem unpredictable so the market is ripe for someone who can actually deliver comment/tweet/backlink consolidation.

I’m very interested, as I used JS-Kit on Blogger and started using Echo on WP. I’m now thinking of switching to Disqus.

http://churchcrunch.com/2009/09/02/i-want-my-time-money-comments-back-js-kit/