It seems so long ago, but back in June I wrote a piece about a new commenting system for weblogs called Enetation, being run by an 18-year-old called Robert Taylor. I hoped he'd do well, as commenting systems have generally struggled to cope with demand, and his was quite a neat solution.
Things, alas, have not gone smoothly, as those of us who use the service (I've got it on another weblog) will testify.
When the system is not down (and it's down a lot), it causes a horrendous drag on the speed of your blog. And this morning, instead of the little "comment" buttons that normally appear under entries, there's a rather long message saying the service is down - but wouldn't be if the weblog owner had stumped up for the "pro" version. A conversation on Enetation's forums (look for the link off the home page) explains what's going on: Taylor says Enetation is "dying out" through its own success. He has signed up some 33,000 users in five months, and Taylor's early confidence that his hardware and bandwidth could cope has vanished, to be replaced with clear irritation that users are moaning about the service, or lack of it.
But I'd have to side with the users on this. If you offer a service, even a free one, you should provide it. The responsible thing to do is close off new subscriptions (as the other comments services have) if things get overloaded. That's because users will only pay for this kind of service if they've seen it work well in the past. Better to have 10,000 happy customers than 33,000 unhappy ones, because a higher percentage of happy campers will make a contribution. Hearing the service is "dying off" is unlikely to have the cash flooding in either - you want the service to stick around after you've made your contribution.
The only consolation for Robert is that people much older, and with a lot more cash behind them, have made very similar mistakes in the move from free to fee. But, in the meantime, it looks like it's time to start looking around for a new commenting system, again...
