I installed the sxore comments management system on this site back on April 4th. I had a few issues getting it up and running but one of their developers was very helpful in getting it going. At the time I noted a few limitations and behaviours I wasn’t very happy with. Some are core features of the system which will not change and but others could change and I was reassured that they would.

Since then I have stuck with it in the expectation of the changes happening but I am starting to get very concerned about progress and direction for sxore.

This is a system designed for blogs but the last time they updated their own blog was on April 17th. This is also the last time the software was updated. The idea of release early, release often must not be in use there. They really need to change their behaviour as they have now become totally opaque and I don’t even know if they are still developing.

Compare this to the ClaimID guys who post several times a week and are constantly releasing small useful upgrades. Myself and a bunch of others complained when their recent hCard improvement was totallly US centric and they changed it in less than a day!

I will list my issues with the sxore system at the end but the single biggest concern I have is with the fact that my comment data is in their silo and I have no way of getting it out. I purposely use the word “silo” since that is one of Dick Hardt’s favourite phrases when criticising others. The reason I stuck with sxore was that I was informed that they would provide [a] a full RSS feed of all posts/comments on the blog and [b] a sxore to Wordpress export/import.

My sense is that sxore has got minimal traction in the blogosphere. Apart from this blog I have only ever seen it on three others - two of which are related to the sxore business itself. I am not surprised by this as the lack of any news or obvious progress on the product means that no-one is talking about it and therefore no-one is trying it out.

As a result, my confidence in sxore is now seriously reduced and if it was possible, I would revert to standard Wordpress comments. The existance of an export/import system would, in a strange way, restore confidence and probably cause me to stick with sxore as long as some timelines and roadmaps were given for the other fixes.

Or maybe not. I have just realised that the management interface is completely broken for all recent comments and I cannot access them. I reported the initial problem on June 9th and it was confirmed as a bug. Here we are a month later and no change. I think I want out. How do I get my comment data back into Wordpress?

This is the list of issues/problems as I currently see them. Many of them are surely fixable with minimal development effort.

[1] They host your comments. This is a core feature and will not change. Requires huge trust by the user [2] There is no way of getting that data out of sxore if you decide to leave [3] There is no “Subscribe to comments” facility [4] Whitelisting only seems to work for sxore employees? [5] I have to approve my own comments! [6] There is no “Recent Comments” facility [7] I cannot edit commenters comments. This is a core feature related to information ownership. But it is a serious pain if something in a user comment causes formatting issues on the blog. [8] Multiple personas have not been implemented in sxip yet. So I have two sxip accounts and two sxore accounts [9] There are no permalinks to comments so you cannot refer to an individual comment by URL. [10] It adds “Post a comment” buttons to Pages which have been identified as “non commentable” in Wordpress [11] The count of comments and trackbacks on the management interface are wrong due to some incompatibility with the Feedburner feed that I use.

BTW, I have switched Feedburner feed over to ATOM 1.0 instead of RSS. That explains why you saw a lot of my posts re-listed as new. Please let me know if it causes any issues.

[tags]sxore, sxip, Dick Hardt, Identity, RSS, ATOM[/tags]