A poor solution and a good one.

Well, further to that last post, two things have happened that make my life easier and might make yours too, if you're one of the hundreds and hundreds of thoroughly pissed-off ex-Haloscan users out there.

Firstly, JS-Kit have noticed just how appalling their self-induced PR was and introduced a free 30-day trial period for their product. You know, like they would have done in the first place if they weren't thick as a mince plank. This could be good, not because I need to try their platform, Echo, out — I've already seen enough to know that it's laughably bad — I mean, for fuck's sake, this is supposedly a commenting system built by people who just smugly and cluelessly announced "the death of Comments" — but because it may be possible to export comments from their Echo platform to other platforms which aren't crap or owned by companies who extort their customers or both.

Secondly, and almost certainly a lot more importantly, a very nice man called Kirk has spotted the gap in the market and just gone and damn well built a replacement for Haloscan, which looks great.

One day, in the currently purely hypothetical universe in which I have any time at all, I might even build my own comment thingy. Yeah, I know: hollow laughter. In the meantime, a giant thank-you to Mr Kirk Tridentscan.