Is commenting on JTA worth the frustration?

Is anyone else out there finding commenting on items on the JTA website to be almost more hassle that it’s worth?This morning I attempted to submit a comment, only to have the “Post rejected” message displayed, with no further explanation given. I then switched from the Firefox 3.x browser to IE7. This time, after clicking on Submit Post, the article was simply refreshed and the comment vanished, without any rejection or confirmation message. I tried again using Flock (Eco-Edition), and the comment was finally accepted.

I don’t have the coComment extension installed on Flock though, so I had to go back to Firefox in order to manually paste the text into coComment.

It’s just as well I always compose my comments using a word processor, then copy and paste to the web, or the exercise would have been even more frustrating.

The JTA website’s support for coComment (or vice-versa) is at best a little uneven. coComment works fine on JTA blogs such as The Telegraph, but tends to be unreliable when used along with the main JTA website.

(You can access my coComment comments here.)

By the way, although the comments footer for an article usually displays the message “Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically”, if you do enter a URL in your comment, it will almost certainly be rejected. How about some consistency here?

One more thing: Why is the count of comments on JTA items always out by one? An article with 1 comment shows 0, while an article with 2 comments shows as 1, etc.

With the exception of the coComment issue (which is not really the JTA’s problem), I have reported all these irritating bugs to the JTA – most on more than one occasion – without any response or resolution.