All of our bylined content on LEDs Magazine — including feature articles, short news articles, and even blog posts — has had and will continue to have a feature that allows you the user to post a comment on the content. We recently went through a corporate-level upgrade of all of the PennWell Corporation (our parent company) websites including installation of a new comment tool that is based on software from a company called Livefyre that specializes in audience engagement. Alas, no such major transition proceeds without problems, and in this case we have at least temporarily lost the existing comments that were posted using our prior software. The timing could not have been worse for us because we had a couple of items that had attracted contentious discussions among our audience, and that led me to write this blog post.
I've received a few messages questioning our motivation behind the disappearance of the old comments. Specifically, one of my prior blog posts on CCT choices in outdoor lighting had received dozens of comments — many of which vehemently disagreed with my point of view. Please trust me when I tell you that we would never manage a set of user comments based on whether not those comments agree with my opinion or interpretation of technology. In fact, I very much enjoyed reading the back and forth between our readers and thought it was a healthy and proper use of our website.
At the individual magazine level, we were unaware that comments might not be migrated through the site upgrade. I have been working with our web team for weeks trying to get the comments for all of our content restored. I still hope that will happen. But there are third parties involved, including the vendor behind the prior comments platform and the new vendor Livefyre.
In the coming days, I will post a follow-up to my original missive on outdoor CCT. I am hopeful that we can reopen the conversation. And later we will restore the prior comments if all goes well.
Meanwhile, I would like to tell you a bit more about Livefyre because our decision to transition to that platform was based on a plan for better engagement with readers. The new system has a better user interface and works more reliably than the old one, although we admittedly had a few trying days getting started with it. You should see no problems with Livefyre at this point if you want to add a comment. We have tested it and it operates well with the most up-to-date Internet browsers.
Moreover, Livefyre will ultimately allow us to capture comments to our posts on our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and display those comments on our website. Going forward we should have the best of both worlds. You will be able to add comments directly to our site — on any article page or blog post — as well as being able to share the content on your own social media accounts. Or you will be able to comment on our posted content if you follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
