You’ll notice a few things are different around here. We’ve changed the look of the site a bit—it’s cleaner, more readable in my opinion–though it’s not radically different from what you’re used to. Most everything should be where you left it. The biggest development is actually something you might not notice right away. Swampland (and the rest of Time.com) is now what the web design folks call “responsive.” The site will realign itself automatically depending on what device you’re using to surf the Internet, and move itself around to accommodate the size of your browser window. That means no more awkward mobile sites or horizontal scrolling required. Neat, right? You can read more about that from Time.com managing editor Cathy Sharick here. For our loyal commenters, we have good news and bad news. Disqus, which many of you weren’t wild about to begin with, is going away. We think LiveFyre will offer a better experience for you. But that means your Disqus handles won’t work anymore. You can sign in with Twitter, Facebook, Google or create a new account for LiveFyre on Time.com (it won’t work elsewhere). Your old comments will transfer over to the new system, but it’s going to take a little time. Don’t freak out if you don’t see your recent comments reappear for a few days. Change is scary, but we’re confident it’s in service of a better product for you, our valued readers. Feel free to drop me a line if anything seems amiss or if you just want to gripe about how we ruined the entire Internet for you forever.
Ok. Two things:
1) It took me DAYS to finally figure out how to display the dang comments.
2) The new comments section sucks. Plain and simple.
I don't even read comments on websites where I can't sort by "liked". It's the best possible way to filter out the fluff/crazytalk, and get to folk who actually make valid points.
Comments are a great tool to find extra information, give you some perspective on what was written by the author of the article. The prior commenting system allowed me to get a great deal more from the swampland articles than what I got elsewhere. No longer, though.
I'm afraid I will be moving to other websites now. I just no longer get the enjoyment out of Swampland that I used to. It's like reading a newspaper article now. Flat & two dimensional.
Ok, guess I can't edit posts anymore either. Great. Meant to say "one dimensional".
I know the decision to switch was financial for Time, but still, man, the decision sucked.
The comments section is buggy for me. I'd click on an article that says it has so-and-so number of comments, but when I get to the comments section, it displays either 0 comments or a number less than was declared. Refreshing the browser does nothing. Is this just a delay?
tried to reply to Jenna below grape_crush, and got an error that wouldn't print my comment. Is this a "reply" problem? Here's the comment I was unable to post:
@jennalanger @grape_crush AAARGH. Don't know how bobell avoided the automatic "at." Please let me know.
It was really nice, coming on a thread late with 300 comments on it, to be able to sort by most liked or most popular now, and not just by first or last. Please bring that ability back to us. Please get us an edit function. This seems much more about trying to take advantage for you guys in "helping (us) share our opinions with (our) friends," than in enhancing our commenting experience. I've never needed much help sharing my opinions.
Thanks for hanging around.Personal point. Am disappointed that when we respond to people they now have the prefix "at." There was a time when we just got to be people, and when you talked with someone you were talking with them, not appearing to talk at them. Perhaps I should have kept "theoldkathy," since I'm a curmudgeon about this.
This the old kathy back to being kathy - if my new log in works.
The post is readable, the comments have now shrunk in point size, or at least it appears to be so. I'm not a fan of changed formats, but we'll see.
So continuing the search for functional flaws, I posted a comment over on MG's post, got an error (which is a different class of problem), tried to repost which got me a funny message about double posting, copied the message in whole, reloaded the page, pasted the message.... and discovered that all my double line breaks had become SHIFT+Enter style line breaks which, as I've discussed below, break the system.
@La_Randy I can't see them either. My suspicion is that the reason I can't post is that I'm trying to post to a different universe than where the existing comments are. It's probably related to the 5hrs of downtime we saw earlier in the day
@La_Randy My impression is that Livefyre isn't a huge operation and that would limit their ability to (a) run a test server, (b) install the system overnight when people aren't using it?
On the flip side, who at Time thought it was a brilliant idea to move such an untested system over to production two weeks before the election when the most user-interaction-intensive area of the site is the political forums? The only reason I can think of is that it was more important to roll out the new skin and show it off before the election (because of the expected influx of traffic), but is it really that hard to switch over the comments system after the election is done?
@forgottenlord @La_Randy True! They are having technical problems big time. You would think that this was the first time Livefrye has implemented a blog system.
Clarification: I can now edit my account. It also has the ability to email me when someone says my name which will work for emails on reply.
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did you guys do any testing before deploying. On Firefox, the left margin is toofar too the left and when I tried logging on w/ my Disqus account, all I got wasnada. When I tried obtaing the pw, nada. Do you folks have any idea of the newage of media. I still haven't figured out why I can't log on through my Timesubscription, as I get the popup subscribe to Time. Henry Luce would haveoffered a much better experience and he was from the print age.
I do have one complaint. I seem to have a hard time getting more comments when I click on "More Comments".
Ok, thanks. I thought I was doing something wrong. I'm not all that tech savvy, and I hate all of this change:-)
Considering my typing skills, I had better compose in Word , spell check and cut and paste until there is an Edit function.
It's not that it ruins the internet experience... but I don't necessarily want all of my online experiences connected. I don't want to sign in with an account that says it can update for me or will connect what I do with my social networking with what I do in internet discussions. I'd rather an account that verifies who I am and ensures I behave appropriately, but doesn't insist that I link up to another account. I liked being 'Adam Will', and not suddenly have my picture or other life brought into the mix.
And lets welcome Jenna Langer, VP of Customer Experience at Livefyre, who's lurking around...presumably trying to get a feel for things.
Not that I'm expecting a response, but I am wondering what Livefyre brings to the table that we (or Time.com) didn't have before. Change isn't cheap, and it would be interesting to know what's in store.
@grape_crush Thanks for the warm welcome :) We're definitely excited that Time.com is using Livefyre for their community platform. Livefyre brings a lot of great things to the table like real-time comments, lots of social features to help you share your opinions with your friends and followers, bringing the conversation back to Time.com, and much more. I hope you're getting a good feel for the system and would love to hear your feedback (we're already gathering great info from this post).
A big change as well is that you now have a Time.com profile, really focusing on your profile within Time.com and your impact on the community within this network. You can update your profile and settings by hovering over your username above the comment box at the top and clicking "edit profile."
What you've seen so far is just the beginning of how Time.com will use Livefyre. Get ready for some LiveBlogging, LiveChats, and more social curation to heighten the conversation and content across the sites.
Jenna (notice, no automatic @) -- It all sounds lovely, but a lot of us Swamplanders used Disqus solely for commenting and replying, and we'd like to have at least as much functionatlity with you as we used to have with Disqus. Several of the features that kept us from simply abandoning Disques have vanished, and using IE with your software is like having dial-up.
Please read our complaints -- please -- and see what you can do about them. In particular, please help those of us, like me, who are stuck with IE and can't try other browsers. Also, please get us an edit function, and allow us to navigate without having to return to the home page each time. There's more below (or above, depending on whether you can get "oldest" to work).
I'm as much a Swampland addict as anyone, but if it gets any more difficult to use the comments I'm just going to hole up in my bedroom reading Proust.
Thank you.
Just testing here to see if I'm up and running. I hope the new system will eliminate some of the more obnoxious trolls.
Weird that my name doesn't just show up as "cin." My twitter sign-on is cin-oh-cin, but my name shows up on Twitter as just "cin." Hmm.
@DonQuixotic @cin_oh_cin I was actually hoping for a "dislike" or "downvote" button, one that collapsed a comment/thread when it got enough clicks. (Think how enjoyable it would be to not have to wade through pages and pages of idiotic/off-topic comments on some of the huge threads!)
And now the biggest problem is obvious: Youtube videos that are linked are not minimized - they are full sized in comments. A certain someone spamming those things 24/7 is going to ruin the comments section now.
@outsider2011 @DonQuixotic I see the videos he's been posting as fully embedded and fully sized without clicking them.
Considering that the biggest Youtube linkers are the biggest Reich Wing jerks, who would even want to watch?
@outsider2011 @DonQuixotic Yes but as frequently as he posts Youtube videos and images, we are going to have a lot of crap all over the board now.
@DonQuixotic @outsider2011 Ah, yeah i see what you're saying. Just makes his box bigger. But you can still choose not to watch.
@La_Randy It's very random - when it works, and when it doesn't.
As pointed out, hopefully we'll get pagination again.
Ok, so here's an odd thing - if you order by oldest, then click more comments - you can't like. Nor can you see who liked. You can only see when you leave it under newest first.. At least in Chrome

