SERVICE ADVISORY.

Our much-hated but free commenting system is scheduled to shut down on Monday, so I have finally bitten the bullet and converted from the Old Blogger Template* to the New so I can use all the gee-gaws long available to more au courant cheapskates -- including Disqus, the new commenting system, which has already pissed off longtime kibitzers Aimai and Leeds Man (this must be some kind of record).

Any of you lovely people should be able to sign up for free at Disqus with an email account, like I did. If you try the email sign-up or the Google/Twitter signup and you still can't get on, you're perfectly welcome to bitch to me about it, but I warn you, I've been running this thing like a Geocities site for years, so I'm probably not the best tech support in the world. I'd do what I can, though. 

As for the memorable japes recorded by Echo/JS-Kit over the past few years**, I have initiated the launch sequence for what both E/J-K and Disqus promise is the migration of the old comments back to this site (that is, the ones that appeared pre-New Deal). They won't tell me when this will go through and, as I am not paying any of these people cash money, I doubt repeatedly smacking the bell at the front desk is going to get me any more solicitude than a gypsy would get asking a Paris sommelier for a glass of water. Who knows, maybe when we come to,  I mean wake up, in the morning the old comments will just be there like Christmas presents.

One day when I'm rolling in dough and can get the good service, we'll all be sitting around in the holodeck chatting like Hef's guests on Playboy After Dark.  Till then I'm afraid we have to wing it with castoff widgets. Sorry. You want high tech, go talk to Matthew Yglesias.

By which I mean, thank you for your patience.

(*I think Gary Farber is the now the last old-time blogger using the original template, God bless him. Wait a minute, he hasn't posted since December 2011. Ha ha ha, I am King of the Popes!)

(** Prior to which, longtime readers will remember, we had another commenting system which went down forever when the old friend who was running it pulled the plug, whereupon the earth halted on its axis and we all froze to death.)

UPDATE. A lot of you are having trouble with avatars. Here's what Disqus says. Not helpful, right? I experimented and had no luck, and I can't find a way to send Disqus a query, Maybe I'll wait for them to tell me that the old comments have been posted (when in reality the website is in flames) and try a reply-to. Meantime, pretend it's 1998!

UPDATE 2. Have tried everything involving avatars (and gravatars) to get mine to show in comments and nothing works. Found the buried Contact Support feature at Disqus and sent them a  note.

Listen... what do you guys think about the Blogger commenting system?

UPDATE 3. You know what? I think the comments here are Blogger comments,  and that the Disqus commenting system hasn't kicked in. But I can't figure it out -- this isn't helpful -- so I'll wait to see what happens when Disqus "importing" finishes. Sorry, I'm dumb.