Back in 2010 when HaloScan/JS-Kit/Echo decided to raise their fees for providing a commenting service by a factor of about twelve, I switched to DISQUS. I was assured that I could import my Echo comments into DISQUS – all 40,000+ of them.
Well, I could, but DISQUS didn’t know what to do with them. You see, there was no way for DISQUS to figure out what posts the comments attached to. Echo left that information out, apparently, or at least didn’t place it where the importing program could find it.
Those old threads are still out there on the Echo servers, but I have links to very few of them. I didn’t figure Echo would continue to support comments for bloggers who weren’t paying them, and I was right. Apparently even more right than I thought. Echo won’t be supporting comments for anybody other than major commercial customers, apparently. On October 1, they’re going to all go away.
There’s a lot of good stuff in those comments, and it pains me to know that it’s all lost.