About a year ago, I switched commenting systems; Disqus had become increasing bloated and unpleasant to use, so I switched to Commento, which had the advantage of being relatively cheap and, compared to Disqus, massively easier and quicker to load. As a transitional thing it worked well enough, but it quickly became clear that there was inadequate support and it would occasionally go rather inconsistent. Unfortunately, it has grown increasingly inconsistent in the past month or so, to the extent that it is very unpredictable. And I've occasionally been locked out of comments myself recently. Commento wasn't expensive, but I'm certainly not paying for a third-party commenting platform in order not to have access to the commenting system. So it's definitely time to move on.
And it is as tricky a matter as one might expect; most of the commenting systems out there are either absurdly expensive (obviously for businesses rather than little blogging endeavors) or overloaded (with indefinite waiting lists) or are obviously lacking in other ways. After some research, I've decided to try CommentBox for a while. Because Commento is acting up, I'm not sure I'll be able to import any Commento comments, so if you were extraordinarily proud of some comment you left in the past year, I apologize, I guess, since it might be lost to all but the omniscience of God.
It allows for simple Markdown (*italic* for italic, **bold** for bold, > for blockquote). Replies to comments are not particularly good, I'm afraid, although there is a little icon near the name for the comment which if clicked gives a menu by which you can reply to a comment (which in practice, I think, just means that it puts it below the comment to which you are replying and lets those who have clicked the box for emailed replies get a notification.). Comments can be edited for about eight minutes after posting. It requires sign-in (by social media or email) but once you've signed in, there's a little box you can click to post anonymously, and another if you want emailed replies. As with Commento, it will only be on the web version. (I'm sure there's a way it could be done on the mobile site, but the problem is that it would require extensive experimentation with figuring out how to put the relevant snippets in the HTML, and Blogger does not make that easy anymore.) We'll see how it does with spam (which is not as big a problem as it once was, but still occasionally causes problems); the moderation options are not particularly extensive, but as it's a roughly-free commenting service for the moment (it only costs if you get above a certain number of comments a month, a number that I have not reached in a few years now).
Let me know if it gives you trouble.
